Erica Trabold

Erica Trabold
Lynchburg, Virginia, USA

STATEMENT

In my series “Nourishing Flourishes,” florals and food playfully exaggerate the tension between homemaking and artmaking. While the viral tradwives of the internet serve their families only the best, I am interested in preparing food on the page instead of in the kitchen. Art as resistance to “women’s work” manifests in two mediums, essay and collage.

I am a self-taught visual artist and trained writer. My essays are non-narrative, composed in fragments and images, relying heavily on repetition and juxtaposition, gaps and silences, to make meaning. My collages are analog, made with scissors and glue. Material springs from the pages of books, magazines, found objects, and a growing collection of ephemera. Unlike the digital files I create as a writer, when I collage, I make inherently physical objects. I see the tactile nature of these works as evidence of life and creative energy, an imperfect record of days.

Since becoming a mother, collage has become my primary creative outlet and a natural extension of my writing practice. I’m interested in text-image combinations and the novel ways their fusion allows interplay between my old standbys: repetition, juxtaposition, gaps, and silences. Even working strictly with images feels familiar because the process of composing mimics the way I write.

Motherhood has reoriented my creative impulse, and my collages bear witness to the experience of transformation, its darkness and messiness, alongside the euphoria of becoming new. I am not the same, and with me, my art has changed.

BIO

Erica Trabold is an artist, essayist, and author of Five Plots, winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and the chapbook Dots. With Zoe Bossiere, she co-edited the anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Trabold’s essays, fragments, and collages have appeared in The Journal, Brevity, Passages North, The Collagist, New South, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Erica writes and teaches in central Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.

ARTIST CONTACT

EMAIL | WEBSITE

IMAGES