Sam Fields, Weaver Goddess
I first experienced Sam Fields’s textiles in person this September at her solo show eating beauty at Boston’s LaMontagne Gallery. What took me so long? A first glance revealed that this was a very special show. This was a show where the art transformed the space, engulfed it, made the conventional white cube feel insufficient.
Dominate is too weak a word for what Field’s assemblage, color and texture do to their environment. I’d been transported to a haptic dimension where fascinating and obscene psychedelic entities surprised and disquieted me, then welcomed me into their soft embrace. Here was the warm, human capacity of textiles, the woven-together histories of found and new elements, and the powerful presence of the hand mapped onto something completely new – a stark confrontation with hegemonic matters of taste.
Imagine Where the Wild Things on acid; or what one might get if Joann Fabrics had a baby with the world’s best vintage shop and raised it in the studio of Magdalena Abakanowicz or Sheila Hicks. Here was work filled with the emotional depths missing from our flat screens. Here was truth woven from persistence, passion and pain.
Sam Fields, “Interwoven Weight of It,” 2021. Crochet, beads, hand dyed cloth, synthetic hair, underwear lace, hand woven cloth, fringe. 70 × 30 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Sam Fields, “Green Circle,” cast plate in vitreous china, unspun rope. Image courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery.
The gallery was filled with intricate, garish weavings hung from lengths of industrial pipe. Smooth, pastel-colored casts of egg-shaped finials and chair parts nestled in white shag carpet. A ceramic ring vomited a dense tuft of cobalt rope ends in “Green Circle,” (or was that a blue merkin?) and a digital jacquard weaving entitled “Hierarchy of Making,” signaled a central theme of the artist’s practice.
My favorite piece in the show was “I tasted the fruit and it was good,” (2023) a lush, layered, tapestry of crocheted, knit and braided elements including fabric, yarn, synthetic hair, embroidery, beading and lace, all in the pinks, purples and oranges of abstracted flesh. The overall assemblage balanced areas of intricate beading (recalling the topographical beadwork of South African artist Igshaan Adams) crocheted ruffles, elaborate trim, and dyed recycled lace with undecorated swaths of torn acrylic blankets. In the moment I was happy to bask in the sensory overload, but later it made me think about the way our emotional responses to memories fluctuate between intensity and languor.
Sam Fields, “I tasted the fruit and it was good,” 2023. Fabric, yarn, beads, lace, trim, cast finials in vitreous china, synthetic hair, crochet, cross stitch, hand woven cloth, embroidery, pipe fittings/nipples. 70 × 38 × 10 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Protruding from this erotic landscape were two taupe orbs, nipples on the soft layered flesh – or as Fields later told me, maybe goiters or growths – but undoubtedly bodily, cast in vitreous china which is the enameled ceramic material used in the production of bathroom fixtures like sinks and toilets. These protrusions, two of many casts she made during an artist’s residency at Kohler, imply the body asserting itself from beneath the surface like psychosomatic reactions, or the spirit rippling the flesh. Such moments call to mind the ruptures in the mixed media bandage works of the great Harmony Hammond and connect Fields’s work to the feminist artistic traditions Hammond represents.
Writing on the subject, art historian Alex Bacon could have just as easily been discussing Field’s work: “Hammond’s use of textiles often seen as being outside of the tradition of painting calls into question the arbitrary hierarchy of materials, as painting’s conventional material support—the canvas—is of course, a type of woven fabric.”
Detail, “I tasted the fruit and it was good.” Photo courtesy of the artist.
Arbitrary Hierarchies
“I make - slowly - with/through craft. Making slowly is a personal act of resistance against the fast-paced, multi-tasking, product-driven world in which I find myself.”
Sam Fields’s work is complicated, sensual and funny. She makes elaborate, labor-intensive sculpture, installation, performance and public art, trampling the rules of what is accepted in the world of “fine art.”
Fields uses commonplace materials and what have traditionally considered “craft” techniques to challenge established power dynamics and engage the ongoing discourse about the ties between taste and class. Her materials (afghans made from acrylic yarn, factory-made lace, synthetic wigs, plastic beads, found objects) combine to establish a unique, always-evolving visual vocabulary.
For Fields, the language of textiles connects her to her origin story and supports her focus on healing, the body, and social constructs of gender and the domestic. Weaving, knotting, sewing, braiding, beading, folding, raveling and unraveling are ways of intentionally working slowly, resisting the punishing pace and demand for constant production in modern life. By choosing to forefront arduous handiwork, she challenges patriarchal devaluing of women’s labor and elitist art world prejudices.
Sam Fields, “The fallen,” 2024. Cast chair back in vitreous china, salvaged hand made lace shag rugs, salvaged chandelier brush and mirror. Photo courtesy of the artist.
In graduate school at the The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fields remembers encountering the writings of male critics like Clement Greenberg and Adolf Loos who condemned ornamentation. In Loos’s book of essays “Ornament and Crime” published in 1908 and Greenberg’s 1939 essay “The Avant Garde and Kitsch,” they each dismissed the decorative in art to the realm of uninformed, unthinking masses. Anything ornamented, they claimed, appealed only to unintelligent, inferior classes (including in this swath, people of color and women) too out of touch and ignorant to appreciate high art.
Sam Fields, “The Bathers,” 2024. Cast chair legs in vitreous china. 25 × 6 4 in.
For a woman who grew up in a lower middle class community in Brockton, Massachusetts, and for whom craft practices like sewing and weaving were transformational, this was offensive, infuriating and false.
“Who gets to decide what is good taste and what is bad?” she asked when I visited her studio. “I wanted to look at how good taste is connected to a sense of superiority. Good taste looks down on bad taste and calls it common, unintelligent, worthless and ‘low.’ Extending from that, taste and morality become linked.”
As Bourdieu put it in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, “To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’.
So for Fields, adornment becomes a source of empowerment, resistance and agency. She told me, “I think of the ornament in my work as very fierce.”
Sam Fields, “Dripping,” (2022). Dial plate cast in vitreous china, crochet, beads and repurposed necklaces. Photo courtesy LaMontagne Gallery.
Fields’s tongue sculptures capture that ferocity as well as her wit.
Looking at “Dripping,” the first thing that comes to mind is that the pink is too pink – disarmingly pink like Bazooka bubble gum after it’s been chewed. Darker than Pepto Bismol but that reference comes up. The muted blue ring, too smooth and hard for the other materials, belongs in a 70’s lav, like a drain, something through which water or waste would be siphoned. But here it is a mouth, a wide mouth full of pearls, too large and silver-white to be real. They are fake, plastic, showing the heads of the pins which pierce their cores. The pearls tangle like a knot of snakes and disgorge a long, thick, lascivious tongue. Crocheted from synthetic yarn in varying stitches which create ridges in the surface and bend to form its exaggerated, dropping, dripping teardrop shape, the tongue is as shocking and hilarious as a Divine quote as Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos. Baby-fine fly aways wisp from silver-blue edging, trim thin as a line and delicate as lace edges the hanging organ. And the jewels! Diamonds, no - rhinestones. Cheap rhinestones as from a tiered necklace worn by an aging beauty queen adorn the tongue and weigh it down culminating in a satisfying crystal drip hanging from the tip.
The tongue of course controls our sense of taste. It is responsible for chewing and swallowing and for giving us the gift of speech. These overtly kitsch tongue sculptures parody archaic, elitist hierarchies of taste while commenting on insatiable contemporary appetites for more—more stuff, more youth, more sex, more money, more everything.
“Beauty, true beauty, is powerful, this is also why I make what I make.”
Salvaged Meanings
From the beginning, re-use has been at the core of Fields’s practice. She remembers taking furniture apart and making it into something new early on as an undergrad at MassArt. As a fiber artist, salvaging, deconstruction and reconstruction are central to her making. This salvage mindset has impacted the color palette of her work through the years. Early on, the 1970’s afghans she incorporated produced a scheme of oranges, browns and avocados. These gave her enormous freedom.
With color she says she looks to see “what sparks happen when I put two things next to each other, or what can go really wrong.” Like ornament, color becomes coded through the lens of taste.
Sam Fields, “Lady of Leisure,” (2016). Recovered afghans, beads, acrylic yarn, fabric, stretcher frames, sequins in the studio at Benis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Lady of Leisure,” (2016) created during an artist residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, parodies the idea that women are at leisure in the domestic realm. A messy, hulking assemblage literally sewn into the wall, the site specific installation again makes reference to the body and the feminine with a bold exaggeration akin to myth. Fields does appreciate mythology, especially the Valkyrie, Norse goddess weavers of war whose looms were said to comprise of the skulls and bones of the dead. “Lady of Leisure” bows under the weight of her layered fashion, unable to break free of the constraints of her environment. Fields knits all of these thematic threads together into her exceptional body of work, which is why I think of her as a weaver goddess.
Sam Fields, detail, “Lady of Leisure”
In her jacquard weavings like “Hierarchy of Making,” Fields painstakingly deconstructs cloth thread by thread and then sets about remaking it. This act of drawing with thread recalls the work of pioneering Korean fiber artist Lee ShinJa. Beyond meditative—the descriptor used by many textile artists to describe their work—sewing, weaving, crocheting and knitting are almost salvation for Fields.
“The making of the work for me has been a place of healing,” she explained. “Or exploring that place of healing which means coming face to face with trauma. So there is a side to my work where there are little dark corners. For me, the work taught me about my trauma. The making of the work with my hands told me things I didn’t know I needed to know. Opened up places where I needed to find resolution and healing that I didn’t know I needed to find.”
Public Works
Fields has written, “My work wrestles with questions surrounding the creation of identity through both external structures (home, community, institution) and internal structures (our psyche, personal trauma, healing), specifically engaging notions of femininity, sexuality, class hierarchy, and accessibility.”
That external exploration has partly taken place in her large-scale site-specific work. Through the public art nonprofit Now + There—now the Boston Public Art Triennial—Fields created Stay, (2023), a towering open tapestry of spliced-together blue, purple and pink ropes and painted buoys installed on the side of a brick building in the Charlestown Navy Yard. “Stay” “is a response to the Navy Yard’s political, racial and colonial history, its economic of ropemaking and war, its physical location, and our current climate reflected in the site’s more recent histories,” Fields writes on her website.
“Stay” was created at Fields's studio with a team of collaborators. She often works in community with other artists, sharing the benefits of enjoyable labor similar to the inclusive making practices of two of her Boston contemporaries: Rachel Perry and Yu-Wen Wu.
This is the spirit of generosity she brings to the Cloth Collaborative. The Cloth Collaborative is an art making space offering classes, workshops, gatherings and open studio time which Fields operates in the Hyde Park building where she has kept a studio for eleven years. Opportunities to learn how to work with the floor loom, dye fabric, crochet and knit are available for all levels. Read more about the Cloth Collaborative here.
“We believe art has the potential to be a transformative agent in the world both on a personal and cultural level.”
A view of the Cloth Collaborative’s welcoming interior. Photo courtesy of the artist.
In How to be an Artist, critic Jerry Salz wrote, “Art is an unchanging thing that is never the same.” Every time I study Sam Fields's work I see something new. I notice symmetrical single thread stitching making the shape of a vulva or an orchid over layers of crocheted ruffles. I marvel at another layer of tension: high vs low art, personal and political resistance, feminine yet fierce color theory, common yet sophisticated themes, sense of humor with serious talent.
Upcoming
On April 5th, Sam Fields will be a guest panelist for the Gather Symposium at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA.
She is curating a small group of Cloth Collaborative artists as part of a larger exhibition "Liberation Textiles" curated by Liz Thatch and Camilo Alvarez at the Concord Art Association April 3rd -May 11.
Cover image, Sam Fields, “She speaks folly in a thousand ways,” (2011). Recovered afghan, beads. 78” h, 43” w, 24” d.
