Erickson captures his experiences in prints and drawings of isolated, evocative, familiar yet unidentifiable objects: branches, mounds, piles, stacks, tangles, and skeins. As subjects, seen without the benefit of a relative point of comparison, they are almost impossible to identify as monumental or tiny. The original source could be a seedpod or a cloud, a sea stack or an ocean cliff. The confusion of scale happens no matter what the size of the art work: his prints range in dimension from six by six inches up to 43 x 75 inches. In their earth tones and mottled backgrounds, his works are infused with the passage of time, erosion, decay, and with processes that gather, organize and collect small pieces into larger accretions. Erickson revels in the multiplicity of association that his images evoke, hoping we will bring to them our own memories of dangling moss, hay stacks, dense forest leaves, fungi, or weird rocks distilled from wherever we find our spiritual connections in the natural world.

In making an image, he creates an experience of a thing unique to that work of art. His marks engage the control of decades of training but also employ chance events of ink, charcoal or the digital scanner. He intends his creative process to emulate the processes happening on the shore, along the road, or in the woods. Each piece is an experiment or an investigation and when it succeeds, the art is the record of the questions asked that day. He challenges himself by trying new techniques, working bigger or smaller than he is comfortable, modeling the form in new ways, and seeking alternatives to his usual way of seeing the object in space. He knows that through these challenges come happy accidents and calculated transformations.

Some of Erickson’s works evoke columns of smoke, leaves, or cairns of piled stone. In nature these bind together with complex physics. There is an order to the way the physical objects hang together. And as their order becomes apparent in Erickson’s image, we can hover in the moment before the smoke will vanish, the leaves will die and the stones will tumble. In each finished work of art, Erickson gives us something that can never be finished or could be there forever, that is always becoming something else or will never change.  He gives us the concrete and the ephemeral, the thing itself and its emotional resonance. He creates a place he will return to again and again with his body as he makes art, and with his spirit as he tries to snag his memories of all that is ancient, fading, reappearing and stubbornly persisting through the ages.

Lesley Wright, Director, Faulconer Gallery,

Grinnell College