Samantha Giles

California
Writing
Artist in Residence, 2017

A portrait of a person.

Artist Statement

I think I write to try to figure out the answers to questions I’m usually too scared to ask. I’m increasingly obsessed with grey not-circle wedge in the middle of the two circles of a venn diagram where that wedge is maybe my failure to understand. But also what else lives the overlap is between two seemingly disparate spaces or situations. I like to hunker down in this place of uncertainty and I’m most attracted to those projects and questions that navigate the grey areas and make me keep looking at what I’m scared to look at. I like to get lost in a project, to really embrace the failure of getting it wrong, to try to keep asking the question anyway.

While at Headlands

I’m super interested in the complexities of what makes up the total map at the Headlands; the palimpsest of its past and present that most obviously contains militarization, wild space, land and sea, but has lots of nooks I’ve yet to consider. All the different kinds of mammals and not mammals interacting with what’s meant to be there and what’s there anyway. I’m hoping that part of the work I do while in residence is to roll around in these complexities a little and see what sticks.

Selected Works

deadfalls and snares, (Futurepoem, 2014).

hurdis addo (Displaced Press, 2011).