Stay, 2023

Nautical rope and buoys

Splicing rope as an act of radical softness and community-building.

Sam Field'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.

Banner (c) Charles Mayer Photography, Album Images: (c) Annielly Camargo.