Erin Castellan, "Fire Blues"

Artist Statement

In this digital age of slick screens and quick images, I craft physical images that promote slow viewing experiences and intimate, tactile engagements. I am interested in this idea of slow seeing. Particularly, I am interested in how efforts to slow and carefully examine the physical world can connect humans to each other and their surroundings with empathy and compassion. My colorful collages combine hand-embroidery, knitting, weaving, beading, and various found and painted fabrics. I mix the flexible with the firm, the fuzzy with the slick, the labored with the spontaneous, and the actual with the illusory. Tactile curiosities, optical illusions, and relationships that connect across forms are slowly revealed to viewers who take their time in looking. These rhythms, tensions, and material transitions are slow pleasures - to be savored again and again without a rush for meaning.

Artist Bio

Erin E. Castellan received her MFA from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI). Her embroidered and beaded paintings have been exhibited widely including Tracey Morgan Gallery (Asheville, NC), Kyoto Int’l Community House (Kyoto, Japan), The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), White Columns (Online), and Ess Ef Eff (Brooklyn, NY). Her work was published in New American Paintings, South (2015, 2020) and she was a 2016 Society for Contemporary Craft LEAP Award Finalist (Pittsburgh, PA). Castellan completed a Post-Graduate Apprenticeship at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), and was a 2012-2013 artist-in-residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, TN). From 2014-2020 Castellan co-coordinated the Arrowmont Pentaculum, an invitational, short-term residency. She currently resides in NE Washington.

Fire Blues, Hand-embroidery on hand-woven fabric, 8” x 7” x .125”, 2021, $300