Patricia Sambo

Artist · Drawing · Human–AI collaboration

Images change
when authorship
changes.

Patricia Sambo works with drawing, physical–digital translation and distributed authorship, examining how provenance alters perception without changing the image itself.

View selected work ↓
Ambivalent Mutations, three framed black-and-white works displayed together
Ambivalent Mutations, 2026 · installation view

01 / Practice

Making →
Seeing →
Knowing

My work explores unstable states between body, image and technology. I am interested in forms that resist fixed categories: bodies becoming vegetal, structures becoming bodily, and images shifting between physical and computational states.

Drawing is central to the practice because it preserves gesture, hesitation and consequence. I work through irreversible processes, including charcoal pencil without erasure, so each intervention becomes the condition of the next. This principle extends into human–AI collaboration, where computation is treated not as a neutral production tool but as another site of agency, interruption and negotiation.

A recurring concern is the relation between seeing and knowing: what happens when a viewer forms an aesthetic judgement before learning who — or what — made the image?

02 / Selected work

Ambivalent
Mutations

2026 · Three-part series
21 × 29.7 cm each

Ambivalent Mutations triptych
Ambivalent Mutations, 2026 · Left to right: Works I, II and III.

Look first. Which work holds your attention?

I

Flesh of Growth in Visceral Eden

Human / Physical · Charcoal pencil on paper · No erasure

A vertically concentrated organic mass moves between plant, organ, cocoon and wound. Folds, tendrils, leaf-like structures and porous passages accumulate through an automatic drawing process in which correction is deliberately refused.

The work establishes the first condition of the series: authorship remains singular and embodied, while every mark is irreversible. Growth appears not as harmony but as an unstable bodily condition — sensuous, vulnerable and slightly threatening.

II

Membranes of Consequence

Human ↔ AI · Physical → Digital → Physical → Digital → Physical

Interlocking membranes, cavities and blade-like diagonals form a denser field in which boundaries are repeatedly created and violated. Protection and exposure occupy the same structure.

The image is made through sequential transfer rather than simultaneous collaboration. Patricia initiates the drawing; AI intervenes; the altered image returns to the artist; AI intervenes again; and the final physical act returns agency to the human hand without erasing the history of transfer.

III

The Garden After the Body

AI / Digital → Physical · Fine-art print

A more symmetrical core expands into radiating filaments and mirrored vegetal lobes. The image appears botanical, anatomical and architectural at once, completing the series by separating physical appearance from direct human execution.

Its role is not to resolve a human-versus-machine comparison, but to make provenance itself part of the aesthetic encounter. The image asks whether authorship changes what we think we see.

03 / Process

Membranes of Consequence:
the transfer of agency

01 — Human initiation
Automatic charcoal drawing begins on paper.

02 — AI intervention
The physical work becomes digital and is computationally extended.

03 — Human intervention
The altered image returns to physical form and is reworked by hand.

04 — AI intervention
The changed object is digitised again and becomes a new computational condition.

05 — Human / final
A final physical intervention returns agency to the artist without erasing the history of transfer.

04 / Encounter

First encounter→Judgement→Disclosure→Reconsideration

The series asks whether knowing provenance changes what we value. Disclosure occurs after the initial encounter so authorship does not pre-empt perception. The experiment is not designed to prove human aesthetic superiority or machine superiority; it isolates the moment when knowledge enters judgement.

05 / Catalogue

Ambivalent Mutations
2026

Three works · drawing / human–AI collaboration / fine-art print

I

Flesh of Growth in Visceral Eden

Human / physical · charcoal pencil on paper · 21 × 29.7 cm

II

Membranes of Consequence

Human ↔ AI · sequential physical–digital collaboration · 21 × 29.7 cm

III

The Garden After the Body

AI / digital → physical · fine-art print · 21 × 29.7 cm

Originals & exhibition presentation

Works I and II develop through charcoal drawing and physical intervention. Work III originates as a digital image. The exhibited triptych presents all three final images as framed fine-art prints.

Image dimensions
21 × 29.7 cm each (A4)
Print paper
Hahnemühle Velvet Balder, 265 g/m²
Framing
Matte black frames, 2 cm passepartout and standard glass
Overall frame size
Please enquire for confirmed measurements
Enquire about the works →

The series treats provenance as part of the artwork rather than supplementary information. Mutation occurs twice: inside the imagery — where bodily, vegetal and spatial forms remain unresolved — and inside the method, where authorship itself moves between states.

Across the triptych, control is progressively redistributed. The sequence is therefore both visual and methodological: a study of making, seeing and knowing.

Download catalogue · PDF
Early study · 2026

New series · In development

How many futures
can a drawing hold?

Before an image is finished, its direction remains open.

This emerging series captures a charcoal drawing at moments of becoming. From these shared beginnings, the artist’s work and independent AI continuations will follow different paths, extending into colour and physical intervention.

What emerges is a constellation of possible works—each carrying traces of the same beginning, each leaving something behind.

06 / About

AI-assisted charcoal motif merging Patricia Sambo's profile with Welwitschia mirabilis
Welwitschia motif, 2026. Decorative image generated through an AI-assisted process using the artist's portrait and reference photographs of Welwitschia mirabilis as source material.

Patricia
Sambo

Patricia Sambo is an Angola-born visual artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her practice centres on charcoal drawing, works on paper and experimental human–AI collaboration. She explores the meeting point between Surrealist automatism and the material experience of drawing, taking inspiration from André Masson’s automatic drawings and Max Morise’s participation in Surrealist drawing experiments.

Drawing begins for Sambo without a fixed subject or a predetermined image. She follows the movement of the hand and the associations that arise as one mark leads to another, allowing forms to emerge before deciding what they might represent. This intuitive process can feel effortless: an image seems to arrive from a place she has not yet explored or put into words. The developing drawing can surprise her, revealing relationships she did not consciously set out to create.

That openness remains grounded in the physical act of making. The pressure of charcoal, the resistance of paper and the accumulation of marks shape what becomes possible. In drawings made without erasure, each gesture remains part of the work’s history. Bodily and vegetal forms recur, but their identities stay unsettled: a leaf may suggest an organ, a protective fold may become an opening. Sambo leaves these associations available to the viewer, inviting interpretations that extend beyond her own.

In Ambivalent Mutations (2026), she brings this interest in emergence into a documented sequence of physical and digital interventions. Human–AI collaboration extends her investigation of control, surprise and authorship, asking how knowledge of an image’s making changes the experience of looking.

Download artist CV · PDF

07 / Contact

Exhibitions,
residencies
& collaborations

For exhibition, acquisition, curatorial, residency and collaboration enquiries: