samantha m. eckert

Samantha Mercadante Eckert | Wandering in Hope | TW Wood Museum, Montpelier, VT | April 3-May 27, 2026, opening reception on Friday, April 3, 5-7:30 PM

Featuring abstract paintings, organic clay forms, sculpture, and fiber art, this exhibition explores beauty, memory, and longing through an intuitive, process-driven artistic practice. Responding to technological change and the lingering uncertainties of the post-COVID era, the work evokes dreamlike landscapes and natural, living forms. Together, these pieces invite contemplation of the emotional and environmental forces shaping our lives today.

Exhibition Statement: my newest body of work is in acrylic painting. The Hope Series is grounded in process, material inquiry, and the interplay between interior states and external structures. These paintings build layered surfaces through accretion, erasure, and gestural interruption, situating the work within contemporary abstraction that privileges becoming over resolution.

Rather than presenting a singular image, the work operates as a field of temporal activity—evidence of decisions made, resisted, and revised over time. The chromatic range suggests a dialogue between immersion and grounding, while linear scaffolds and web-like traces recall architectural or infrastructural systems.

Material gestures such as dripping, scraping, and staining function as deliberate strategies that destabilize fixed meaning. The surface resists hierarchy: no single mark claims authority, and no focal point resolves the composition. This refusal of closure aligns with feminist and post-minimal approaches that value multiplicity, vulnerability, and process.

Tensions between organic flow and imposed order reflect my interest in how human systems—technological, urban, and ideological—intersect with lived experience. Through acts of wandering, both in daily experience and within these entangled dimensions, my goal is for the work to invite slow looking, asking viewers to navigate layers as they might memory, liminal space, or landscape—nonlinearly and intuitively.

Other works featured in the exhibition:

The ceramic installation Stella Maris draws its shapes from seashells; structures built through endurance and the slow shaping of natural forces. Additionally, the forms evoke flowers and garments, blurring boundaries between nature, body, and relic. Their folded surfaces evoke sanctuary and strength while referencing the Holy Mother Mary, Stella Maris— meaning Star of the Sea, a guiding presence for those navigating uncertain waters. Here, Mary embodies a feminine agency that is protective, steadfast, and quietly transformative. Viewed through feminist perspectives, the shells become metaphors for bodies and spirits capable of holding, nurturing, and withstanding pressure. Hand-building allows the clay to assert its own will, emphasizing collaboration between maker and material. Installed to rise and fall like waves or breath, the forms evoke pilgrimage, movement, and renewal.

Branches of Return examines heritage, lineage, and displacement through reconstructed hand-beaded sticks gathered along forest paths tied to personal and ancestral histories. Cutting and rejoining the wood mirrors fragmented identities shaped by migration; reconstruction becomes an act of repair and resilience. Beadwork flows across surfaces like accumulated memory, binding segments while honoring imperfect reconnection. Suspended branches form a floating pathway whose shadows suggest ghost-routes of those who came before. Crystal beads reflect light and recall fruit sculptures made by my Italian grandfather, while repetitive hammering becomes ritualistic and restorative, situating the work within broader histories of migration, colonialism, and Roman Catholic faith.

The banner installation, Shrouded in Clouds and Letters, serves as a homage to ancestry and cultural inheritance. ‘Clouds’ gesture toward the mystical, while ‘Letters’ evoke whispered messages from a liminal space where ancestral voices guide the artist’s practice. Perforation patterns drawn from a crocheted textile made by my Italian grandmother transform an heirloom into an index of migration and loss. By translating crochet into cut openings, absence becomes design—marking what remains and what has vanished. Each opening is finished with a blanket stitch, a gesture of care underscoring tenderness, repair, and safekeeping.