Erika Lynne Hanson
Hanson is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose work is rooted in textile practices. The projects range from video installations to participatory public workshops that actively engage with various sites and their inhabitants. Currently an Associate Professor of Textiles/Socially Engaged Practices at Arizona State University, Hanson received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and a BFA in Fiber from The Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at spaces that range from Form + Concept in Santa Fe, to Field Projects in NYC, to the Tucson Museum of Art. Additionally, Hanson has participated in residency programs across the US and Scandinavia, with particular attention to rural locations that support the ongoing dialogue regarding posthuman ecologies within her practice.
Education
MFA, Fine Art, California College of the Arts
BFA, Fiber, Kansas City Art Institute
Expertise Areas
Area of study
From "Future Ecologies"
A dry lake, shades of pink, wildfire smoke, lichen, a rock, a fake rock, the horizon: this work has been made since the onset of the pandemic as a fluid imagining of possibilities for viewing the current and future state of the desert southwest and beyond. Woven tapestries, found and crafted objects, and lens based work offer an expanded view of the ecology of place that equally incorporates and values a mountain, or a traffic cone, or an arch.
EXPANSIVE EMPATHY / tapestries for the geologic (installation view)
Tapestries for the geologic inhabitants surrounding White Sands, that may or may not have not have noticed we used to crash into them
From "Attempts at Time Travel"
time is weird. its contemporary manifestation it is at once fast and slow, and more often than not, mediated by a digital screen. I weave objects to alter this perception of time, working deliberately and patiently in an attempt to relate to that which exists outside of an individual human time scale; e.g. rocks, trees, cities. can such gestures help to speculate a another present and future?
Artist's statement
In his essay "From Things Flow What We Call Time" Timothy Morton writes:
"Again: before it is Nature, ecology is coexistence. Ecology is weird because it is the uncanny realisation that there were always already other beings. Awareness of ecological beings – a meadow, a city, a coral reef, a microbe – is in a loop."
Weaving - as a practice, history, and metaphor - forms the core of my research and creative work. I draw from pre-historical traditions that rely on the simple interlocking of threads, yet also utilize contemporary practices intertwining digital technology, collaboration, site-specific projects, and social engagement.
Using landscape as a consistent subject and weaving as a persistent practice, my work is conceptually grounded in questions of political, economic, and ecological systems. Each project reflects site-specific research with an emphasis on questions of ownership, value, and exchange. I develop strategies for establishing relationships between the landscape and that which inhabits and helps constitute it (rocks, humans, lichens, fences, ground squirrels, safety cones, decorative plants, etc).
My work seeks to illuminate multiple temporalities through both process and outcome. Time-intensive craft technologies (woven textiles, ceramic vessels, cast concrete) are combined with found, purchased, or borrowed objects (rocks, slag glass, lichen) to offer a record of a site-specific encounter. With these objects in dialogue, new sites are forged to consider our contemporary relationships with human and non-human systems and networks.