Tom Shields
Arts/Industry: Foundry, 2016
Tom Shields (NC) has been working in wood in one capacity or another for over twenty years. He first learned woodworking by working in the trades as a furniture maker, cabinetmaker, and carpenter. In 2010 he received an MFA in furniture design/woodworking from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Shields works with the furniture form in ways that are often unexpected. Using found, discarded, or trash furniture, he manipulates these forms to question not only how a piece of furniture functions but also how their arrangements affect their meaning. His compositions challenge the design of a chair, but also ask us to consider how its placement can force us to interact, or not interact, as human beings. Every chair in essence is a representation of the person. Just as we do, each chair has a back, legs, arms, and a seat. Beyond this visual connection to anatomy, Shields hopes to engage the viewer physically. Two people seated back-to-back relate very differently than people seated in a circle. These considerations are essential to his process, and his choices reflect deliberate contemplations of our own human interactions.
In 2015 Shields received a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Grant. His work is held in museum collections including The Gregg Museum of Art and Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh; The D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, MA; the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC; Wingate University, Wingate, NC; and an outdoor installation at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
He has shown extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States. His work is included in private collections and has been published in Lark Books’ 500 cabinets and in Schiffer Books’ Mind and Hand—Contemporary Studio Furniture. He is a former Penland School of Crafts resident artist, a Windgate Artist-in-Residence at San Diego State University, and he completed a three-month stay in Hickory, NC, where he was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Century Furniture, which was inspired by and modeled after the Arts/Industry program.
