Erica Fitzgerald
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.
Earthenware, glass, latex (tree sap), human hair, memory foam, faux fur, thread
Various sizes
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.
Seagrass, thread, prairie soil, latex (tree sap), acrylic, wire
Following linear relationships between feminine labor, earth, and familial traditions through the lens of climate change.
Ceramic-coated rattan, empty internal spaces, earthenware, glass, basket ashes, iron oxide, dead traditions
Seagrass, found rooted tree
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.
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).
Women’s role in current and past 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.
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.
Sacrificing Andromeda
Disturbances are determined by sweeping steps
Sacrificing Andromeda, chained to rocks that weigh on warmth. Vulnerable black soil mounds over voids, with vibrations they churn. I smelled fluid and iron from the gaping holes.
Scavenged by wolves, helpless to understanding
Hands and thumbs have already erased their histories. A simple price paid for incubated eggs in soil blindly taken. The bowels of the network oozing paper with long lost value.
Scrambling of power, contributions are over sited in grids. Miles on miles under our feet but depleted in wombs buried in contaminated hollows. Brought to time, we were the connection to circles and circumstance. Never a God, we made these worlds collide.
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.