ERIN SCHWAB
handcrafted wooden objects of use
My work is an investigation of relationships within an environment. I search for the most honest way to enter and translate my interpretation, be it through charcoal, porcelain, or wood. The changes can be small, as simple as the speed of northern light over quiet forms or as profound as a flood and fire.
In 2013, the Hangingstone River flooded Fort McMurray, and our relationship as a community to that river changed. My art practice changed with it and I focused my drawings into large representations of hyperobjects created by the change in the landscape.
In 2016 the Horse River fire engulfed Fort McMurray and changed my practice again, but this time by taking my home, studio and my work. During the 2 years it took us to rebuild and return home my desire to represent the change that happened in our lives manifested in the move to 3-dimensional forms in wood and objects of use. Simple forms that represented the loss of a cultivated domestic life and, much like the flood, a drastically changed landscape that I had to redefine and find my place comfortable in again.
Whenever I walked through the relics that remained from these events, the logjams that changed the course of the river, the totems of burnt trees, I thought of how hard we fight with ourselves over the nature of our relationship with our environment. Maybe we are not like the other animals that drink from the stream, maybe we are instead the flood, a force that changes the course of the river and that the land will heal over and in time forget.
