Since the completion of its installation onto the six-story wall of the historic Hoosac Stores warehouse on July 21st, Sam Fields’ “Stay” has been stopping Charlestown residents and visitors at Lot Lab in their tracks. The scale of the nautical rope sculpture inspires reflection and awe – over 300 ropes and 7 weaved buoys have been arranged by Fields to resemble rolling ocean waves. Vibrant glimmering shades of blue, pink, purple, and green represent light reflecting on the sea’s horizon line; and when the ropes shimmer and move as the wind blows or the afternoon sun casts shadows on the sculpture, its waves feel alive with motion.
Photo from Stay’s installation
The story behind the making of Stay is a testament to the site-specific histories of labor and maritime culture that informed Now + There’s curation and Sam Fields’ carefully considered design. When we approached Fields, we knew that we wanted something vertical and colorful for the brick facade that overlooks Lot Lab. Knowing the artist’s experience in textiles and interest in feminist histories of craft, we shared articles like “A Mouse in the Rigging” from the USS Constitution Museum and "’We Can Do It!’ - Shipbuilding Women invade the Charlestown Navy Yard” from our partners at the National Park Service. During our research, we also learned that the Navy Yard’s Ropewalk – a long, narrow facility where rope for ships is made by extending and twisting strands together– was the first shop to employ women and that women were a large percentage of the Ropewalks workforce.
Article clipping from Boston Navy Yard News, courtesy of National Parks of Boston’s Digital Humanities & Innovation Team
Given all of these resources, Fields took inspiration from the rope rigging techniques used for ships like the U.S.S Constitution. She discovered that sailing stays are used to stabilize and support the weight of masts, and that a mouse is a bulge woven from many different chords that acts as a heavy-duty stopper preventing the stay from tightening up on itself. These are the two forms that Fields chose to use for their design and also the inspiration for Stay’s title. The artist loved that sails and rigging must be soft to sail into the wind, while also considering stay as a verb: to bring the ship's head up to the wind, or to point the bow upwind in order to go about.
Sam Fields’ hand-made scale model for Stay
Intentional process and labor are also an essential part of the work behind Stay and Fields’ wider practice as a textile artist. Craft is a philosophy for them that acts as both resistance and a model for change, a tool for pushing against current structures of inequitable power. Fields took symbolic inspiration from the act of splicing in rope work and rigging, the forming of a semi-permanent joint between two ropes or two parts of the same rope by partly untwisting and then interweaving their strands. Every single one of the 300+ ropes, or stays, on Fields’ sculpture is laboriously spliced around one of the seven mice. Fields chose splicing as opposed to knotting because knots typically reduce a rope's strength by 20–40%, while a splice is capable of attaining a rope's full strength. In the artist’s own words:
“While a splice takes longer to make, it is a connection that retains the strength of the rope. Splicing requires many strands within the rope to reconfigure, working together to make a connection. This is a beautiful illustration of the work of community building and connecting both backward and forward in time.”
By the time Stay’s fabrication was completed by Sam Fields and her team of 10 all-femme splicers and weavers (an intentional choice on Fields’ behalf, honoring the women laborers from the Yard’s active years and her own commitment to uplifting and supporting femme-identifying creatives), the needle was threaded approximately 6,400 times to create 318 rope splices. Each of the seven buoys took nearly 40 hours to weave, totaling 280 hours, not including the rope splicing. Altogether, approximately 8,900 feet of rope was used for the stays on the 40-foot tall sculpture. Stay is, without doubt, a labor of love. And despite its scale, the power of human touch is felt in the softness and swaying of the sculpture, where Fields has translated yarn into rope and transformed rope into a monument to the power of softness, staying, and craft.
Above: Behind the Scenes of Stay’s making, courtesy of Sam Fields
Banner image: Lot Lab Opening Celebration, Now + There, 2023. Photography by Annielly Camargo.