Fiber Artist Grant Recipient, Spring 2010
Samantha Fields

Artist’s Statement

Home is a stage supporting archetypical roles. It's the setting for an everyday spectacle. This is a springboard for my artwork: an amalgamation of home, circus, and theater. Inside the walls of the house we often play very different roles than those we play outside. These walls, the primary objects of the house, function as literal boundaries, where public and private commingle. We use them in our nearly constant attempt to reveal and conceal. Home is a shifting place of comfort and discomfort, of order and disorder. 

I am working with both life-size domestic materials and miniature, to explore these comforts and discomforts. I am drawn to using full-sized furniture because of its physical presence, its weight as an object of our daily lives. Most of my materials come from thrift stores and others' homes:  indoor/outdoor furniture, building supplies, fabrics. Each has an embedded story that is ever-present despite my attempt to re-arrange, re-gather, and re-present them. In deconstructing and reconstructing, I am playing with the mutability of these familiar objects and their ability to transcend their intended functions while maintaining those functions' original associations.

The miniatures function in similar ways and also bring not only the objects—and our interaction with them—into question, but also the rooms in which our daily rituals take place. The dollhouse is a plaything supporting and reinforcing our fantasies, memories, and nostalgia surrounding the home. Through peeling back the walls, I explore what structures actually support the home, and the spaces that exist between our fantasy and our reality, between what is desired and what is attained.