Samantha Mercadante Eckert | Wandering in Hope | Nuquist Gallery, TW Wood Museum, Montpelier, VT | March 30-May 23, 2026. Opening Reception on Friday, April 3, 5-7:30 PM

Exhibition Summary | Featuring abstract paintings, organic clay forms, and sculpture, Wandering in Hope moves through beauty, memory, and longing. The work responds to technological change and the unease that has settled since the pandemic — paintings that conjure interior or otherworldly landscapes, and sculptural forms that feel grown rather than made. Across all three bodies of work, material process is central — whether paint, clay, or wood and bead. Each medium is treated as a collaborator with its own logic. The exhibition invites viewers to move through layers the way one moves through memory or unfamiliar terrain, without a fixed point of arrival.

Om the paintings | There is a moment in painting when thinking stops and something else takes over — less like skill and more like attention without object. My practice is built around the conditions that make it possible: slow accumulation, reconsideration, and the willingness to stay with a surface long after it becomes uncomfortable. The newest paintings resist hierarchy: no focal point resolves the composition. This refusal of closure aligns my practice with a feminist approach that values process, multiplicity, and vulnerability.

Each mark is a record of a decision made, then questioned, sometimes destroyed, and started anew. The surprise and momentum of liquid paint moves through the work, seeping through grids and web-like structures. Light seems to come from within; color buried and slowly rising. These are otherworldly dreamscapes, places to slip into —an escape from the relentless noise of the world and the feeling of being small inside something vast and indifferent. The work holds both the instability of not knowing and the insistence of continuing anyway. That tension is where the paintings become possible.

The ceramic installation Stella Maris began with thinking about seashells — structures built through endurance and the slow action of natural forces. I hand-built these shapes so they evoke flowers and garments, blurring the line between nature, body, and relic. The idea came through thinking about the Holy Mother Mary, Stella Maris — Star of the Sea — a figure who has oriented those who are lost. Here, Mary carries a feminine agency that is protective, steady, and quietly transformative. The shell-like forms become figures for bodies and spirits that can hold, shelter, and absorb pressure. Installed to rise and fall like a tide or a breath, together they suggest pilgrimage.

Branches of Return came from walks. I gathered sticks along forest paths tied to my own history and to the histories of those who came before me, then cut and rejoined them. That act of reconstruction is, for me, an act of repair — of identities shaped by migration, by what was carried and what was lost. Each branch is meticulously hand beaded. The beadwork moves across surfaces like accumulated memory, binding segments while acknowledging the gaps between them. Suspended together, the branches form a floating pathway — the ghost-routes of ancestors. The crystal beads catch the light and bring back memories of my Italian grandfather, who made crystal-beaded fruit sculptures: the source memory for the piece. Months of labor and the repetitive act of hammering became its own kind of ritual. The work situates itself within broader histories of migration, colonialism, and Roman Catholic faith — and within my own place inside those histories.

Pellegrina Italiana | In July 2025, I found myself in Rome during the Vatican Jubilee Year, coinciding with a week-long youth pilgrimage that drew one million young adults from around the world. I wasn't thrilled at first, but we got swept up in the energy. Two American tourists somehow ended up walking with a group of Brazilian pilgrims, who sang beautiful hymns in Portuguese all the way through the Holy Doors of St. Peter's Basilica. Then, stepping inside, I stopped dead in my tracks — Michelangelo's Pietà, right before my eyes. A mother cradling her son's lifeless body. Astonishing and beautiful. You’ll find a few clips from that trip in the gallery.

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