4 minute read
Particles, Heirlooms, and Erin Cunningham’s Idaho
Heirloom, Pastel, watercolor, ink, charcoal, graphite, and gold leaf on bleached paper with found objects, 2023, variable dimensions. PHOTO BY WYTSKE VAN KEULEN
BY AURORA MEHLMAN
Countless pictures in antique frames hang in mosaic on a wall patched with old-timey wallpaper. They form an irregular circle around a portrait of a woman. Her likeness is crafted from ash, charcoal, dust, and gold leaf on bleached and stained paper. A slight, elusive smile plays on her face, as if she knows some secret you do not. Her features are hazy, partially lost to shadow and time. As you behold the picture, its center deconstructs like blotted stars, giving you the illusion that it is fragmenting before your eyes. The piece is Particles, from Erin Cunningham’s recent installation, Heirlooms, which was held at Boise State University’s Student Union as part of the Forage and Fallow Exhibition.
Cunningham is a multi-disciplinary Boise artist and adjunct professor at Boise State University with compelling and intense dark eyes, a warm, clever smile, and a love for thrifting, comedy podcasts, and hanging out with her dachshund Mabel. In Heirlooms, she wanted to delve into her Idaho roots. Working from family lore, archival history, and artifacts, she began to piece together what she referred to as the “difficult and dirty” lives of her homesteader forebearers.
Cunningham explored what was handed down from generation to generation, whether it was objects, experiences, stories, or traumas. While conceiving and creating the pieces, she focused on the question, “How [do you] give people a narrative without directly saying anything at all, seeing how people can pull together, from these bits and pieces, some kind of event or occurrence or plot?”
Cunningham’s interest in narrative harkens to her days of creative writing at College of Idaho. There, Dr. Garth Claasen encouraged her to take a figure drawing class. Soon she was studying art full time, ultimately earning an MFA from BSU in 2011. “I am part of the [art] department, and the department is part of me,” Cunningham said. Nowhere is this bond more evident than in Cunningham’s portrait of BSU President Marlene Tromp, which she was commissioned to paint in 2019, and which now hangs in the Student Union building.
Through a series of interviews, Cunnigham got to know Tromp intimately. The conversation was fluid, with the lives of the two women and their deep ties to Idaho and the American West influencing the creation of the portrait. In the portrait, Tromp stands firmly amid a field of wildflowers, with the Boise hills banding the horizon. She is wearing her signature glasses and flashing her inimitable smile, her competent hands enfolded. The oil-painted panel portrait is striking. You feel as if Tromp is about to reach out to shake your hand or ask a pivotal question with her characteristic warmth. In the background, the sky is an intense blue, reflecting Cunningham’s desire for “the sky to be a prominent part of the composition, to allude to [Tromp’s] openness and the openness of the land, and the potential for growth, the potential for imagination.”
“Erin has a special magic in her to see far beyond the lines and the color and into the soul,” Tromp said.
In all of Cunningham’s gorgeous, haunting, and dynamic work, we experience this sense of lingering within open space, whether in the blood cells she focused on representing after a transplant or the depictions of her family in her MFA thesis. Each figure feels timeless, as if part of the land, its stories, and the shared imagination that binds its inhabitants. Each piece reflects the collective memory of artist and viewer alike, as we too become parts of a still-unraveling story.
You can see a current collection of Cunningham’s work at The Modern Bar through the end of the year.
