Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Video, Ceramics
Website: samuelwildman.com
Samuel Wildman is an artist working in sculpture, video, and installation. Born in Seattle, Washington, he earned a BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, completing the degree in 2023. He lives and works in the Bay Area, where he serves as Sculpture Studios Senior Lab Mechanician in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice.
Wildman describes himself as a handyman and a dad, and his practice grows directly out of that double life — the hours spent negotiating small domestic crises in his own home and in other people’s. He has said the work is rooted in the strange and sometimes mystical bodies of knowledge embedded in the soft labor of caretakers, baby whisperers, and fixers, and that its broad subject is intimacy, care, and repair under the conditions of the anthropocene and late capitalism. A frequent and committed collaborator, he has worked with the artist Gail Grinnell, the engineer Alan Barr, and the collective Public Notice, among others.
Before relocating to California he built a practice in the Pacific Northwest, receiving grants from 4Culture, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. He has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Monson Arts, Sou’wester Arts Week, Signal Fire, and MadArt. Wildman was the recipient of the 2023–24 Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, and received UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. His work has been noted in Sculpture magazine, and the collaborative project bevintage was listed by Creative Capital as On Our Radar.
Wildman’s objects and installations take their form from what he calls the unpredictable shapes produced when social and political absurdities turn up as normalized, familiar, home-like situations. The materials are the vocabulary of maintenance and domestic infrastructure — subway tile and grout, cast porcelain, nightlights and outlets, salvaged lumber, paper grocery bags, shipping cartons, sandbags, a car jack under a highchair. Humor, metaphor, and absurdity do the critical work: a Safeway bag tiled and plumbed into a recirculating fountain, a stone from the yard wedged into a broken load-bearing stud, realtor signs planted in rows to echo a military cemetery.
Running through the practice is an attempt to put highly disciplinary fields — industrial ergonomics, ecology, ceramics, literature, woodworking — into conversation under an organizing agenda of care and criticality. For for those that would sleep, he cast porcelain covers in the shape of flames and arranged the resulting nightlights across a wall to trace the 2020 California fire map, turning a device meant to comfort a child into a record of a burning state. For Hug Studies, made as an artist-in-residence at UC’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Lab, he borrowed the lab’s motion-capture methodology to measure four styles of embrace, producing footage of an avatar hugging nothing at all and asking what unseen forms a gesture of care might shape.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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