With From Under, Within Ourselves, interdisciplinary artist and Art Academy alumna Erica Fitzgerald explores traditional practices and rituals that have passed from generation to generation. That’s not limited to basketry, the medium in which she’s working; this exploration reveals insights about learned behaviors and perceptions of self and community. Through ancient weaving practices, she digs deep to consider what aspects of herself she herself has buried and what she can release.
She writes in her artist statement: “What feelings, roots, and memories are allowed to slip through the stitches of a familial basket, when others are held tightly? I wonder if they’re the things that I can afford to miss or the feelings I allow to be free to nurture themselves back into the earth. Never made to feel like they are hidden or stored away, not held so tightly that they are no longer seen at all.”
During a conversation between Erica and our AAC marketing team, she describes the work as deeply personal. “It’s dealing with struggle and with what falls through a basket. What is a basket holding when we’re talking about family issues and how we got here? It’s why I use more of an open-weave basket—it’s that ability to keep what is serving you and let go of what is not serving you.”
Check our more of our conversation below.
AAC: What materials are you mainly working with for this exhibition?
EF: Primarily, I work in traditional basketry that has been taken outside the realm of tradition to hold things and has been flattened. I’m working with seagrass, I’m working with basket charcoal. I’ve taken the baskets that I’ve made and made those into charcoal and then made them into ink so that any of the writing that is going to be seen will be made from the baskets using that charcoal ink. And then I use a lot of soil.
AAC: That the coolest thing that you take apart a basket and use the charcoal as a new material.
EF: It’s a new kind of process for me that I’m trying out, but it seems to be working. There’s a specific way to burn things so they don’t quite turn to ash and they stay at charcoal.
AAC: In your artist statement, you said that lot of these works were created while you were at the Burren College of Art in Bally Vaughan, Ireland. How long were you there?
EF: I was at the Burren College of Art for about five weeks, and that was sponsored by the Wilder Foundation and the traveling arts scholarship. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the ecology of Ireland, but the Burren is a really unique geological site. It looks very barren, but then there are orchids and beautiful “life things” happening in between all of these stones.
EF: I have a long tradition with Ireland. My husband is from Ireland and I had actually applied to grad school at this college. I got in, but we couldn’t figure out how to make it work. They offered me a residency instead, and I decided to just go and do that for a summer. I was interested in that location because they were combining art and ecology. They do have an art and ecology program that is their master’s only program and then they go straight into Ph.D. So, it was interesting for me to be there and to have the opportunity to take classes, or sit in on classes over the summer, that combined art history, history of Ireland, and then history of ecology mixed with art.
I also did a couple of days in the Aran Islands where I was learning basketry, and I was learning basketry from this very old man who only spoke Gaelic. It was a very, kind of material interaction, you know? Very visual, very hands-on. We couldn’t really communicate very well. That ended up being a good opportunity that came from just being at the college.
AAC: What a unique experience to have. It sounds like it was so authentic to the culture that you were in.
EF: Yes, yes, yes, very small town, everybody knows everybody. It ended up being more of a community experience than I had expected, which is something that I work with in the work that I do anyways. The tradition of basketry being such a community tradition and way of processing and making necessity, it was cool to be rooted in that while I was there, learning and experiencing a new country for that long too.
AAC: You mention in your artist statement that you’re using ancient ritual techniques. What do those techniques look like? How do you describe them?
EF: In the context of basketry, I think it goes back to familial tradition and familial knowledge and the things that, you know, people historically did and made to sustain themselves—to carry food from one way to the other, one part of the country to the other, or from the beach to the to the table. And so, it kind of stems from those necessity-based practices—and then the way I use them is to channel that through ritual, what I call repetitive ritual. So that’s the same stitch you’re using to weave a basket every single time, over and over and over and over again. It’s ingraining it into your mind but it’s also giving you the opportunity to communicate in a way that is nonverbal. It’s just the same way that a painter uses paint on a brush differently than another painter that kind of sets them aside from everybody else.
So I’m using those really ritualistic task-oriented [methods]—what people would typically consider craft, in a way—taking it out of a craft format by flattening a basket and using light through what would traditionally be like a vessel. It’s something that takes ritual from necessity to art in a context and conveys something just a little bit differently.
Read Erica’s complete artist statement and view photos of her exhibition. From Under, Within Ourselves is on view in McClure Gallery until Sept. 20. View more of Erica’s work at her website.
Our galleries are free and open to the public, and no registration is needed. Check-in at the security desk is required. View all upcoming exhibitions for the rest of the season.
Gallery Hours:
Monday – Friday: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday – Sunday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Location:
Art Academy of Cincinnati College of Art & Design
1212 Jackson St., Cincinnati, OH 45202
Traveling via the Connector streetcar? We’re right around the corner from station 7 in Over-the-Rhine!
