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 holds an MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her BFA in Sculpture from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
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 the cultural, ecological, and gendered histories found in early craft technologies. I focusing on weaving, cordage making, spinning, and basketry, to investigate how domestic life skills found predominantly within the home were essential to survival yet historically detrimental to marginalized narratives. I demonstrate these ideas through large weavings, performances, and soft sculptures to research the hierarchies that lead to performing these tasks in European prehistory. Researching via making the relevance of invisible labor and how it contributed to early social organizational structures. Recovering these practices of slow making and reenacting them within a contemporary fine art framework, to expose the complexity of women’s labor and the role it played in shaping domestic, ecological, and communal societal structures.
Making sculptures, performances, and installations using my body, fibers, and soil to explore cycles that connect women throughout history by hand craft making. By materializing laborious making practices, I place the body in space as oversized open-weave basketry structures to tie generational tradition with historical and familial traumas. The uses of labor, touch, weight, and pain are essential to the working and manipulating of fiber into an 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. It is both a literal and symbolic act of reclaiming what has been damaged, reflecting women’s enduring role as creators and restorers in the face of societal fractures.