Erica Fitzgerald
Duck canvas, thread, wood
As women historically transformed fibers into cloth, they wove and repaired not only physical structures but also the fabric of their communities, binding generations together through skill, tradition, and shared strength. Each thread becomes a testament to resilience, and each stitch a defiance of oppression. Like spider silk spun strong against the storm, this collective act of mending transforms loss into power, reclaiming space for women’s voices and stories. By supporting women in the creation of something monumental in size and weight, we embrace the historical and symbolic strength found in feminine labor, building a tapestry of unity, care, and empowerment—a space for connection and dialogue as we mend together, both literally and metaphorically, the tears in our world.
This work was generously supported and mended in collaboration with the Women’s Resource Center of the University of Illinois, whose work is dedicated to improving campus climate and promoting gender equity through programming and services, including identity and career development, violence prevention, confidential advising, and survivor support.
Porcelain, concrete, state documents
Nooses, necks, understanding of a woman in a place that she cannot grow but gorge herself on pregnant, stagnant promises. Farther right to understand the trauma placed in her shoes. Magic through veins, hex and power. It’s her only option. It's only loud and a racket to ears that can’t feel the smacking, cracking, tensions of a soft hardened body against walls we did not build.
You can’t possibly feel the pain in a metallic sound, these voices reach further into corners and cornfields than we ever thought they could. We were losing our light, gagged on the bible pages that lodged in our thoughts while we suffered terms and umbilical misguidance. Doctors holding deep inhaled air in their bellies as not to displace the scale.
The Place Where My Body Left The Floor,
The Place Where My Body Left The Floor,
The Place Where My Body Left The Floor, 2024
Shredded Dobbs Vs. Jackson Women's Health Documents, copper, charcoal
This work attempts to track relationships between feminine labor and earth through manipulation of land-based materials via touch, weight, pain and damage. This process investigates restrictions and their connection to American legislative systems that control reproductive bodies.
Performance still
During my residency at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós, Iceland, I found myself captivated by a 113-year-old staircase tucked into the southwest corner of the historic Kvennaskólinn house. Its worn steps and creaking timbers seemed to hold the echoes of countless stories, inviting me to engage with it not just as an architectural relic but as a living participant in the space. This fascination grew into the foundation of a performance art piece, where I used the staircase as a site of exploration—examining themes of memory, passage, and the physical marks of time. Each movement became a dialogue with the space, tracing the intimate connections between history, body, and structure.
Earthenware, glass, latex (tree sap), human hair, memory foam, faux fur, thread
This work exaggerates physical touch and material manipulation to emphasize the similarities women share with malleable changing resources. Using performative rituals, I maneuver my body to react quickly to a soft material, like clay, which can be molded but also hardened or shattered by touch, force, misuse, or heat. Through the process of pressing, beating, touching, and scraping with my fingers, I'm able to apply enough force to the clay to imprint my actions upon it, often violently.
I use these works to investigate American systems that fetishize abuse and rape culture to strip bodies of their right to reproductive healthcare.
In collaboration with Maija Mallula, and Jarin Tumpa.
Over, Under, Around & Through re-envisions a border as a complex tapestry of human fallacy and harmony, simultaneously producing separation, growth, and disintegration. Threads of soil with contrasting seed mix weave together, spreading over, under, around, and through the space. Traveling upwards, the border roots gradually become airborne and growth halts. Traveling outward on the ground plane, submerging and reappearing, they slowly melt into the landscape. At its core, the warp serves as a deposit of the varied reasons borders are constructed. As the weft takes root among the warp, they visually and symbolically blur the lines that typically delineate space, fostering a sense of unity and shared potential, pulling away from the border.
Touching a ceramic body on a concrete floor
Live performance
This body of work examines materials and their relationship to physical bodies. Labor, touch, weight, and pain are present in the working of a wet clay body into a manipulated object through movement and gesture. These actions and qualities are mirrored in American legislative patterns to restrict people able to carry and bear children. This practice is used to research societal restrictions placed on reproductive bodies to highlight their connection to the process of manipulating a tactile material like clay. This negotiation through physical touch generates fragmented feelings that situate the tactile work within relatable emotional reactions.
Ceramic-coated rattan, empty internal spaces, earthenware, glass, basket ashes, iron oxide, dead traditions
Seagrass, found rooted tree
Experimental textiles made in residence at The Burren College of Art.
String, twigs, maybe hay, all have to be worked through the hand, and the fingers in a particular way. Pulling, twisting, pushing, sometimes painfully into the appropriate place over and over again in the same motion. Someone who already knows how these materials should move to create a basket guides each strand gently and specifically.
My grandmother of countless generations before me used her hands to do this in the same way I do it now. As I sit with a ball of seagrass, I think of her, what was she thinking about, coping with, eating, singing, and experiencing while she was simply recording life with her hands to make something she needed?
Seagrass, something I already knew, weakened weft, opportunistic holes, birch wood, things that are no longer here, repression
I was never taught to weave. My great-grandmother was never inclined to show me how to make a vessel to haul our heavy fish from the sea to the hearth. No one showed me how to set up a loom, stitch a basket, or twine grass into an object meant to hold our food.
I was taught to bury things; Shown how to hide roots in deep, dark, damp soil with the assumption that that’s what was necessary for them to grow. The greenery above the ground the only evidence of a healthy body below. I was instructed many times to dig holes for the squirrels and rabbits the family dog had killed. Each impact of the shovel to dirt reminding me that an innocent animal had been killed simply for the pleasure of the hunt. I was taught to bury my tears because wet eyes are a sign of weakness. Often scolded for being the kid who let their emotions run around on their sleeve, unprotected and wild.
The unintentionality of assumed weakness offers the opportunity for what’s being held to fall through. Maybe a small piece is meant to get away.
Polymerized acrylonitrile, clay
(Pomegranate, Lemon, Sumo orange, Onion, Jicama, Sweet potato, Star fruit, Guava, Butternut squash, Lime, Pear, Coconut.)
In this work, touch negotiates the relationship between land and reproductive bodies. Soft clay is manipulated into a long, flat slab, then marked by the remains of sepals, stamens, stigmas, and pedicels from fruits and vegetables. A thin layer of latex covers each impression, taking an exact replica from the clay. The raw clay is allowed to dry out and change forms naturally. But the clay lifted out of the impressions by the latex gets stuck, unable to find its way back to its original body and the earth. My body is left wondering how we’ve become so similar yet so separate as we occupy the same space.
Polyethylene sheeting, state soil, machine stitching, acrylic, EPA permissive guidelines
The devitalization of soil and the use of land for patriarchal development are directly related to the human impulse to dominate and control women. The productivity of soil and women ultimately determine the existence of all life. “In Western patriarchal culture, both women and nonhuman nature have been devalued alongside their assumed opposites–men and civilization/culture” (Kemmerer, 2011).
Womens role in societies have been strictly based on the needs and desires of men. These societies seek to domesticate women as they have domesticated land, cattle, chickens, cats, and dogs. There is evidence of this within social patterns in beauty standards, child-rearing rituals, household expectations, rape culture,
federal and state legislation, and systematic wage gaps. Therefore, we must understand and redefine the capabilities and limitations of soil, nature, and women in within current culture.
You Have The Tools, 2021
Performance Still
The act of baking bread seems simple. Relatable to the act of getting a job and earning a wage. As women, we are often passed up for opportunities, not given the proper tools and judged based on gender as to our abilities. “women’s work” is of lower monetary value than men’s work, as a result occupation that are feminized are considered to deserve less monetarily than men.
