What is your name?
Ericka Walker
Where are you from?
I was born, raised, and attended university in Wisconsin. I currently live in Mi’kmaqi, also known as Atlantic Canada. I work at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a professor in the Fine Art Department.
Who are your favorite artists and biggest inspirations?
As far as papermakers go, I’ve been following the Combat Paper Project and Frontline Paper for years. I have a lot of veterans in my family and I have an abiding interest in how people carry their service experiences when they return home. There are the usual routes: veteran organizations like legions and VFWs, staying in touch with service buddies, Facebook groups, the personal placement or display of service medals, or watching films about war. For some of my family members I believe these activities had value, but didn't necessarily bring them a full reckoning with their military experience in a way that helped them feel whole. I’ll also admit to having a sincere fondness for artistic practices that reconstitute materials that have had other lives. John Risseeuw, for example, has created artist books and other discrete works of art that use the fibres from locations and humans whose stories he is making visible. I am drawn to pondering the possibility that the material used in the making of an art object imbues it with some essential pith that was carried in the original objects. From another perspective, the act of shredding, beating, pulping materials as reckoning also sits well. The artist Melanie Yazzie has done some exciting work where she shreds American Western novels and incorporates the shredded paper with still legible text into handmade paper. This act not only provides catharsis for someone like Yazzie, whose family and community have been the recipients of hundreds of years of colonial violence, but it gives viewers an opportunity to see the hubris of how these time-honoured frontier stories are explicated so romantically. The snippets of phrases from these books are removed from their original context and denuded of their ability to tell their stories.
Where did you discover printmaking & papermaking and how did you get into it? Of the several forms of art-making out there, why do you feel that printmaking is the field you gravitate towards?
I stumbled upon printmaking when one of my professors, Bob Erickson, who was teaching one of my early drawing courses, nudged me toward printmaking. I think he showed a few of us the print studios, and while we were walking about looking at all of the equipment, I couldn’t ignore the works that were up on the walls. The graphic nature of the art works I was seeing and the variation possible in the kinds of mark making were an ultimate seduction for me. I would spend the next three years making terrible prints but always with those example works from the walls of that studio in my mind, I knew what printmaking could achieve and to my surprise, to this day, I stuck with it long enough to develop a grasp of the methodologies. I also deeply appreciate how print and graphic art generally have shaped so much of human culture across the globe, and for centuries. This is a powerful platform on which to place an artistic practice. When we make prints we take on that historical context, it accompanies the work. This art work also functions as a piece of art which often (not always) has a different job to do than the countless, unfathomable amount of prints that were made whose job was to communicate, to editorialize, to catalogue, to document, to teach, to persuade, to agitate. I like this vibration and even tension between print as visual culture, and print as fine art. It’s been fun to play around with the permeable boundaries between these things.
Rolling Thunder, 32x48in., woodcut, 2022
What is your biggest rule in the studio?
This is a fun question that I’ve never tried to answer before. What I think I have here is not a straightforward rule that I operate with, but more of a guiding challenge. Like many artists, part of my studio practice involves pulling together field work or research in service of developing a sincere and thorough relationship with subject matters. The technical parameters of making a print are another set of factors to contend with, and then there is the aesthetic qualities of the things I make. It isn’t a stretch for me to lose sight of aesthetics in service of making something that really gets at the meat of what I am studying. Throughout the course of whatever studio work I am doing, I have to regularly pull myself back to one of my most important goals, which is to create something visually arresting, even beautiful. The basic tenets of design and composition are critical for me here. There are times when I have had to walk away from a work, to allow it to get stale in my mind so that I can reapproach it at a time when I am better equipped to make it a handsome thing, instead of demanding that it functions well as a cerebral exercise. I find with some space and gentle reminders, I can usually thread both needles. Not always, of course.
From what I’ve gathered by looking at your work and other readings, you seem to have an interesting connection with color. Could you describe your relationship with color as an artist?
Yes! Here, I've actually copied part of an interview I did about color (from the website “Reflections on Color and Printmaking,” a research project of Laura Crehuet Berman - to see the full interview click here: https://www.reflectionsoncolor.com/interviews/ericka-walker?rq=Walker)
For about a decade I have been creating large lithographic works that emulate state-sponsored propaganda and advertisements of the earlier half of the 20th century. Since the advent of colour printing - and particularly colour lithography in Europe and North America - there has been a complex science behind the way colour is employed to capture attention, and how it can evoke a tone of voice sympathetic to the agenda of those doing the persuading.
Different types of appeals involve different colour schemes. Many wartime illustrators found ways to embed their national colours into the colour scheme of their propaganda posters. Other illustrators were limited by a short number of press runs, where the overlap of relatively few transparent colours could achieve surprising amounts of variation, or when the use of splatter techniques (and eventually the employment of half-tone dots) achieved a range of value, all despite access to a limited palette.
When artists like Jules Cheret began creating large scale, colourful posters, efficiency of production was front of mind, and so doing a lot with a limited colour palette was important. The use of primary colours and establishing contrast in value though the use of color compliments typifies the strategies used in this early era of the poster. I spend a lot of time looking at these early poster works, both online and in-person whenever I am able to access museum archives and private collections. I pay attention to how the pigment in the inks has faded over time, how blacks become brown or purple, how reds become faint pinks. I attempt to employ some of these same colour strategies in hopes of tapping into what we recognize today as one aspect of the nostalgic essence of the originals.
Sails Off, 22x38in., lithograph, 2022
Do you see your works being made in any other medium besides printing - or is that medium the only thing that works for you?
For a few years now I have started translating the type of image building methodologies I use in printmaking, into painted murals on barns and rural outbuildings. I see a strong link between the posters I am attempting to emulate in my lithographic practice, and the types of advertising murals that were common to see in the rural midwest and south, especially in the earlier part of the 20th century. I’ve completed a few of these murals and I’ve been extremely satisfied with how that work brings an experience with art to people who aren’t expecting it. I think certain kinds of artwork are at their best when they are experienced outside of the context of a gallery or institution. Since I am so frequently concerning myself with topics that have roots in rural regions, it only makes sense that I make these murals where, perhaps, the questions they're meant to provoke have a chance to resonate with the landscape and the people who live there.
To Pieces, 22x38in., lithograph, 2022
I’ve seen that for a decade you’ve made prints that evoke similar imagery/structure as propaganda posters of yesterday. Can you describe your journey in that art-making process during those 10 years and what you came out of it with?
This could be a long winded answer if I don’t focus it on one specific way of contextualizing my practice. I started these “posters” with an interest in exploring the legacies of my family and families like mine. People who would be considered apple pie, whitebread Americans from the midwest who lived out their lives farming, teaching, working in steel mills, raising children, and serving in the military. I had questions, especially, about the way that military service was understood. In towns like the one I grew up in, it was understood to be a noble pursuit, one described with words like duty, honour, sacrifice, etc. I could see that my family members, in their own strange ways, honoured their service in foreign wars, and for much of my life I felt compelled to go along with that, to respect their decisions and their experience. The more I made art, and the more I got comfortable with my role as one who is to mirror and critique culture, I became interested in the dissonance I experienced when considering this regard I'd always held for my family’s participation in war, experiencing friction with respect to my being repulsed by the military industrial complex and the shameful histories and realities of how the American military has been used. I believe that engaging in studio practice works well when we begin with questions, and set about to dig into those questions - to really immerse ourselves in all the avenues and tangents and explorations they afford. I’ve never been particularly comfortable with articulating the original, more personal question I started the work with. I write a lot about the more academic questions that the work addresses, and that have influenced the making of the work, but I’m taking a stab here at articulating the original, personal question that I asked in graduate school when I started these posters. “My culture reveres and celebrates the activities of my family members, we have attempted to construct a national identity around depicting industrial workers, farmers, and servicemen as salt of the earth beacons of American stoicism and wholesome values. How does my pride in my predecessors and ancestors square with my skepticism of that constructed American story? Is there room to honour these people but also hold truths like this one: My father was just one small step removed from the bombing of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese combatants and civilians?” That is as succinct as I can make it right now. And so, enter the Vietnam War, the event in our history that threw into question the valour of military service and the right of passage that failed to be for many thousands of service members. I didn’t know it at the time but I think the presence of that war in my father’s life and in his sense of self was a driving ache and irritation that felt unresolved, especially when I began reflecting on how the legacies of others had shaped my own life. After a decade plus making these posters, with these kinds of questions looming in the background, and sometimes the foreground, I have - or so I thought - come to the realization that “I don’t wanna study war no more.” I thought I would set it down and look at other legacies of settler colonialism, including the agriculture industry, and its relationship to the future of our ecosystem. I do a lot of work with those topics, but I can’t fully turn away from the questions around militarism. When you asked: “What you came out of it with” I chuckled because that is the question I’ve asked myself in the last three years especially. “What am I trying to get out of this?” and “Why can’t I move away?” I decided to take a look at the topic of war from a different angle, one that is much more personal and volatile, and still very much in progress. I am working on a series that dives more directly into my father’s experience in the Gulf of Tonkin on the Flight Deck of an aircraft carrier. I have a lot of questions about this work, questions that keep me invested and involved and questions that shed new light onto why I began making posters about militarism to start with. To go back to your question, I came out of it with a willingness to look more deeply at the ways in which my father brought home and lived with a lot of conflict in his inner life. I have come to realize that I had a hard time contextualizing his confusion because he did as well. I live with his residue. We all live with residues of the wars our country has undertaken on our behalf.
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Interview by Hugo Gatica, April 2023