Recently the amazing artist Cathy Mclaurin forwarded me information on the artist Samantha Fields.   I was so glad she let me know about Samantha as I am blown away and oh so inspired by the installations she creates.

Samantha creates large scale installations that explore the ideas of home, mother, memory, and the domestic. She does this by embroidering amazing and colorful patterns into the actual walls of the spaces that she builds.

She expertly uses layering, scale, and the element of the unexpected to pull on our emotions and send us toward memories that connect us to her experience.

Samantha states-

“Home is a stage supporting mythic roles. It’s the setting for an everyday spectacle. And when we cross away from the threshold, we inevitably play a different role than the one inside. The walls, the primary objects of a house, function as literal boundaries, space dividers, where public and private are kept at a constant, dueling and commingling. What is revealed when these walls are removed? It is within this question that I place my work.

Most of my materials are found and have been used: indoor/outdoor furniture, building supplies, and fabric – which are then dislocated. Each has a latent, embedded story that is never absent despite my attempt to re-arrange, re-gather, and re-present. I have focused on specific, universal elements (or coded sites),
such as curtains, to begin investigating power structures by way of exorbitant, feminine, passive-aggressive excess, or perhaps simply the revealing of a hierarchy –of who gets the mashed potatoes first.”

I am sometimes so overwhelmed by all the amazing young female artists exploring these universal and yet such specific themes of home and the role of the feminine.  Sometimes it make me nervous about my own work and career but mostly it simply inspires me.

Keep inspiring.

Samantha has an excellent website here and if you are near Boston is participating in a show and leading a workshop here.