Sheilds, Tom

2100 Smallman St. Pittsburgh, PA 15222 | 412.261.7003 | www.contemporarycraft.org

Tom Sheilds

I surround myself, both at home and in the studio, with things other people throw away. I am painfully aware of the quantity of “things” in the world, and the landfills that are overflowing with them, so I use the garbage as my lumber-yard. I collect wood furniture from the trash and let it pile up in my studio until it slowly starts to work itself into groups. In the course of a few weeks I constantly move and cluster chairs around my studio in different bunches. Once the groups get narrowed I start letting them talk. I have found that because I don’t work with an empty material, such as a lump of clay or a blank sheet of paper that the most important part of my process has become listening to what the material/objects are saying before I even touch them. The old chair in the corner is already telling a story. The wear on the front lower stretcher, the metal plate added in an attempt to repair it, the layers of upholstery hanging off, and the scratches in the old varnish all show evidence of the lives it literally supported. These damages show us the people who used it everyday to sit in while they worked, ate, relaxed, and lived. To me these stories and marks are what make the material so interesting. When I work with it I never really alter any chair, or change any story too much, I just rearrange their contexts. I tweak the way the different chairs overlap and support each other; I use all their separate stories to tell my own.

These chairs are being used as a metaphor for people, and through that metaphor and their arrangements I am exploring the ways in which people interact. People and emotions are things that can never be predicted or controlled and for all we attempt to organize and structure these interactions they are filled with chaos and struggle. The ways in which I arrange the stories/chairs I cull from other people’s garbage reflect the complexities of the inter-personal systems we construct around ourselves everyday. Chairs built into chairs speak of dependence; a chair with legs held off the ground but held by another talks of support. Chairs clustered so tight that the intricacies become overwhelming explore the complexities of a group.

All of my work is functional. These relationships, just like chairs are not something we sit back and analyze from a distance. We are intimately involved with them everyday. I intend my work to be sat on and interacted with: instead of merely looking at the grouping and the support, I invite the viewers to sit down and experience it. All of my work is capable of sitting more than one person and the ways in which the sitters are forced to interact within the piece further enhances the complications and complicity of the relationships I am addressing. Two seats crammed into one, force the users to get close to each other; compromise and accommodate. These interactions are limitless and my explorations of them varied.

To see Tom’s resume, click here.