Erica Fitzgerald
Photo: Meredith Hislope
Erica Fitzgerald is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice follows linear relationships between feminine labor, earth, and familial traditions through the lens of material change. She earned her BFA in sculpture with a minor in art history from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and is currently an MFA candidate and educator at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Statement
“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
My work examines material. Clay (EARTH), plant fibers, and ritualistic traditions are examined through the lens of historical legislative narratives associated with vesselage. The uses of labor, touch, weight, and pain are essential to the working of a wet clay body or a native fiber into a manipulated object through movement and gesture. This process investigates restrictions and their connection to the process of maneuvering a tactile material that responds to my deliberate touch.
I track relationships between feminine labor, earth, and familial traditions
through the transformation of matter. Making sculptures, performances, and installations using my body, plant fibers, soil, and clay to explore life cycles that connect women throughout history. By materializing laborious making practices, I place the body in (landscape) space as oversized open-weave basketry structures to tie generational tradition with historical land trauma.
These pieces detail ecological soil infertilities, and reproductive inequalities that highlight their effect on human tradition within a male-centric consumer society. Through the analysis of ritualistic practices, collection, hand weaving, and movement, I highlight the link between gender and consumer earth traumas manifested in the depletion of natural resources and the stripping of human rights.