Erinn Cox

Artist Statement

On June 7, 2004, I nearly died, and this has consumed me ever since.

As an artist in the dysphasic act of intentional remembering, I am engaged in memorializing that which presents itself in my own memories and those of my family in regards to their medical histories and subsequent traumatic body events. In the act of recording these dense events visually, the act of auto-reminiscing, I am able to psychologically spread the layers of hidden, private moments that I have allowed to remain buried and festering. I am pushed to a threshold where sensations (grief, fear, and guilt) become so overwhelming that they are, in fact, physically palpable and cancerous. Within one body of work, the whole is segmented, eulogized and reassembled with expectations of comfort and reconciliation.
The sieve of personal illness is inescapable and casts every action, event, or moment experienced into shadow, as it does to the anticipated, ungraspable memories I continue to conjure. Illness is invasive; it leaves identifiers, wounds, remnants that the body retains; and in this way, it maintains a secret, private invasion in and on my physical and emotional states – willing me to forget but not allowing me to do so. The source of my pain leaves me stuck with my vulnerable self, and beauty resides within that vulnerability.
My work explores the abstraction of what is expectedly considered an ugly matter with insinuation to organic forms that read as fragments of the human body, and direct representations with fantastical installations to signify importance and content. I utilize the past and present of my memory and the cells, organs, and tissues of my creation to attempt to gain control over those memories. True of every object within the series, my work straddles several borders between the figure and abstraction, private and open, tactile and intellectual. Illness, mourning, and beauty have become my subject and mortality my absolute. These notions are replicated through the metaphors of the jewel and the ornament, the actions of the vessel, and in processes that involve sewing, embroidery, beading, and the casting of metals. Using inherent characteristics of various afflictions, the materials act as interpreter and seducer, allowing the ideas of sickness to become graspable.
Ultimately, it is in the knowledge that I almost died, coupled with the realization that I am dying and will die that I find beauty and the beginnings of consolation. I am talking profoundly with myself, but just loudly enough to be overheard.