Samms works with mediums and disciplines to articulate story, messages, and continual dialogue with(in) historic and contemporary place-based contexts. Samms is known for farming, weaving and natural dye work, and uses performance interventions, motif making, and photo to remember and polyangulate entangled presence and relationship with place and time; in this way, contributing to narrative and re-narrativization/re-membering of her expanded territory. Samms is a frequent collaborator and an Ancestral Skin Marker; her mentors are Dion Kaszas, Jerry Evans, and Keith Callihoo. Samms’ considers weaving and skin marking to be two of the most important acts of presencing and relating across the North Atlantic and Marine Boreal bio-region in her practice.

I’ve spent a lot of my time in residence at the Agder Kunstsenter connecting with Kristiansand—I’ve walked an average of 15 km a day, biked, swam in the salt and sweet water, volunteered, attended local events, kayaked in the Otra River, attended a TC2 jacquard loom technical training in Moss, and assisted in a natural dye workshop and presentation at Bragdøa. My time here has been informative to my process of textual accumulation in developing personal concepts and shared lived-realities of our vast bio-region by closely observing shared land, sky, and water patterns; botanicals; animals; weather; water behaviour and culture; shapes in water, land, and body; and both land- and human-made motifs all while in conversation with people.

During my studio time I’ve reconnected with an important project about my home and how it’s positioned within the broader context and shared bio-region of the North Atlantic and Marine Boreal. The project is about creating communication- and documentation-objects for now and future people about the land that is forever affected by international extraction activities by walking, photographing, weaving, and field work. At the same time in the project, I’ll work with Youth to create public artworks that celebrate other sites in our Valley that make us who and how we are. These works are meant to bring land, home, art, community, future, deeper time, vast bio-region, and ecology together while improving local visual language literacy. I’ve been developing this project while in residence with writing, painting, and my described process of textual accumulation. Being an active participant in local community and investing in conversations and visiting with people in Kristiansand has been motivating and informative to my process—placing human togetherness, communication and place-knowing, and experiences as critical to ecology and the pluriverse is important in my work.