statement

I identify myself as a drawing based artist. For me, drawing, is a way of being - a way I can express my understanding of the world around me. Drawing allows me to witness and echo my daily life, through a visual process. A slow, laborious building of rich lines and gestures, embedded as layers of sediment allow me a record of my mark, mirroring the process of life. The drawings are reflective, as I see it, of a kind of archiving and mapping of points of recognition within the seeming chaos. I rely solely on the drawing process itself to reveal it's final form.

In my practice, I have continued to rely on a linear, drawn language, aiming to evoke a heightened awareness of the bodily form within the work. The scale of work has transitioned, shifting from mural size, reflecting the dimensions of my entire body, to one more intimate. Currently the scale echoes the reach of my arm, and in the very small works embodies the gesture of my wrist. The gestural mapping of my body's movement steps in where the decoding of constructed language can lapse. In life I do not process in a linearly way, nor do my drawings. Through these efforts, I have additionally sought to increase the level that the corporal body is sensed through drawing. This meditative, repetitive, gesture engages my body with a perceptual and cognitive process made visible. The drawings are finished when they accumulate into a labyrinth of interwoven lines creating an experience for myself and the viewer, fostering a kairos sense of time, not limited as in sequential time. Through the act of looking at the work, of recognition and awareness, the viewer may create for themselves a synthesis of time. New meaning can be formed based on the fragment with its mass of interwoven lines that is selected by the viewer. I am interested in how for the majority of my drawing, I am incapable of retaining a visual memory. Each time I visit and allow the works to reveal themselves, I perceive and sense something new. In the completion of the works, I aggressively push netting of lines to a state where they cannot be retained or remembered. In this way, I am inviting others in a visual way, to make sense of the chaos in which we are submerged. It is here, in my labyrinths of material lines, where I begin to glimpse what T.S. Eliot describes as a "still point of the turning world" presented in his passage in the Four Quartets. Eliot describes "the still point"', to be an eternal notion of time, where time is non-linear and therefore cannot be placed in time itself. It is here where the present, past and future can be gathered and possibly known in the present moment. Time is then unleashed from a measured chronological understanding of time. Through my drawings, I begin to witness this still point, and the eternal sense of time.

bio

born: 1982, Somerville, New Jersey

education

University of Connecticut, MFA, 2009
Messiah College, BA, 2004

selected awards/honors

Two Coats of Paint Residency, Brooklyn, New York, 2015

selected publications

Art21 Magazine: Jacquelyn Gleisner, "Still Points in Erin Wiersma's Drawings." 2015
On-Verge: Danielle Fallon, "Lines and Layers: Erin Wiersma's 'The Theory of Line'" 2014
Two Coats of Paint: Sharon Butler, "Erin Wiersma: What's Left of Our Lives," 2014

selected group shows

Mallin Gallery, Kansas City Artist Coalition, Solo Exhibition, Kansas City, Missouri, 2015
Clayton Staples Gallery, Wichita State University, Mapping Chaos, Wichita, Kansas, 2015
A.I.R. Gallery, The Theory of Line: Erin Wiersma, Brooklyn, New York, 2014
SOHO20 Gallery, New Drawings: Sara Schneckloth & Erin Wiersma, New York, New York, 2013