LOT LAB 2023
Sam Fields
Stay, 2023
Nautical rope and buoys
Splicing rope as an act of radical softness and community-building.
Sam Fields's vibrantly colorful Stay, a tapestry of ropes knotted and spliced together, evokes the entwined histories of maritime trade and women's labor in the Navy Yard. Inspired by the "stays" of a ship, which are used to support the weight of its stabilizing masts, and that "to stay" can mean to turn a ship, Fields asks us what it means to stay. What does staying in this historic place, in this contemporary moment, mean? What does it mean to stay in place along a shoreline? What will it take to stay in this community?
Vibrant and expansive, Stay brings together brightly colored nautical rope, “spliced” together via careful maritime ropework by Fields and her team. Several "mice" dot this piece; these bulges reference the "mouse" of the stay, which prevents it from getting too wrapped up itself. These rounded, vessel-like forms suggest a softness; softness is necessary for the stays to do their work. With this, Fields asks us to be soft – open – to what's around us.
Stay was created at Fields's Hyde Park, Boston, studio with a dedicated team of collaborators: Kate Wildman, Beckett Brueggemann, Lex Morris-Wright, Maya Greenfield, Luna Tudor-Doonan, Rusty Janardan, Emi Madsen, Leo Liu, and Lily Cohen. An interdisciplinary artist, Fields frequently works in alliance with others in her textile-driven practice, hosting classes through the Cloth Collaborative, a school for fiber-based making. Stay is along a continuum of context-responsive, site-specific collaborative textile works that are created through and with community.
LOT LAB 2023
Sam Fields
Sam Fields grew up in Brockton, south of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Her work is influenced by her lower-middle-class roots and expressed through her choice of materials, process, and content. Craft is a philosophy for Sam which acts as both resistance and a model for change, a tool for pushing against current structures of inequitable power. She uses the language of textiles to create sculptures, performances, and spaces of engagement. She is drawn to the language of cloth because of its complicated, often disturbing, and yet deeply empowering history; for its involvement with every aspect of humanity, from origin stories to the support or subversion of political structures; how it informs our economic systems, technology, personal history, and identity.
Sam received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and her undergraduate degree from Massachusetts College of Art; and is currently a Lecturer of Sculpture at The School of Museum of Fine Arts |Tufts University. She has been supported through grants from the Now + There, now known as Boston Public Art Triennial, Accelerator program, the City of Boston Transformative Public Art program.
