Today we’d like to introduce you to Erin Dellasega.
Hi Erin, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
Hi! I am Erin Dellasega. I am a 24-year-old artist currently working in Athens, Ohio. I was born and raised in Kansas and moved to Ohio about a year ago to pursue my MFA in Painting + Drawing at Ohio University. I grew up in Southeast Kansas with my parents and my three brothers and they will all tell you that I knew that I wanted to be an artist from a fairly early age.
During my undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, I was able to pursue painting and drawing, and I also discovered an immense love for textiles and garment-making during my time there. I received my undergraduate BFA from the University of Kansas with a minor in Art History in May of 2020. Right after that, I moved to Charleston, Illinois for a year, where I received my Master of Arts in Studio Art at Eastern Illinois University in May of 2021. The professors I had at EIU encouraged me to look at Ohio University for my MFA, and I am incredibly grateful because the art community in Athens and at OU has been so influential on my creative practice.
I moved to Athens last summer and have been really enjoying my time there, spending most of my time making work in my studio space at the Ridges. Outside of my studio practice, I love to enjoy as much time as I can outside, running and exploring the trails around Athens. I tend to find a lot of inspiration for my work during those contemplative times.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely has not been the easiest journey. I remember feeling fairly lost during my undergraduate studies when it comes to exactly what kind of work I should be making. I certainly felt a lot of pressure to be constantly making the best work possible. I had explored a lot of landscape oil painting and more traditional forms of working that were not the best fit for me. Thankfully, during the last year of my studies there I was able to identify the necessity for failure in creating any progress in my studio practice. It was important to learn what worked and what didn’t work, as simple as that sounds.
What helped me the most in finding my voice was the ability to take studio courses in textiles and sewing during my final year at KU. I knew that I always had a love for clothes and fashion growing up, and I initially wanted to pursue fashion design before I decided to forgo that route and focus on painting and drawing. I definitely felt that fashion design was a little too far out of reach for me. However, during my senior year at KU, I took two textiles’ courses with Hadley Clark which completely changed the way I view myself as an artist, how I view clothes, and the material I am using to create art objects. Through learning how to sew and construct garments, I realized that nothing really is that far out of reach, I just needed to start.
I decided to go the MA route after being denied from the MFA programs I applied to in 2020. I knew it was difficult to be accepted into an MFA program directly out of my BFA, but I had decided that I wanted to teach, so continuing my education was the way to go. During my time at EIU, I focused solely on painting. It was a very difficult year, being that it was also the height the Covid pandemic. I spent most of my time isolated and alone during that year. Luckily, that gave me the advantage of time. However, I definitely felt that there was always something missing in that work, despite how happy I was with the progress that I made. It wasn’t until I moved to Athens that I was able, and also given the time and space, to combine these processes.
Now that I have combined my garment making with my painting practice and have incorporated my work in sound and video, I have been able to find and address the subject matter that I have always been at the heart of my work. It took me an entire semester at OU to really find this voice. I am lucky to have the mentors that I have, because they have given me the environment necessary to make these discoveries.
It really feels like my work as an artist has just begun over the last year, so I am very excited to continue my work in Athens over the next two years.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My current work explores the meaning of my learned femininity and how it coincides with memory, trauma, time, place, and family. I have overlapped my practices of painting, textiles, garment-making, and video-making in order to address these topics.
My work comes together in many different forms. I create stain-like paintings of shadows and silhouettes on large-scale floral bedsheets that have either been inherited from family members or bought second-hand. These paintings address feelings of a life-long imposition of familial and religious ideals, as well as the ability to address the fact that I am okay with certain traditional notions of femininity and domesticity. Over the last year, I have ruminated on the ways in which my grandmother and my mother have passed down different versions of femininity to me, which has been a realization that has impacted the presence of memory and place in my work.
In addition, I create garments and dresses, some from the remnants of textiles used in the paintings, which allude to styles and clothing I was dressed in as a young girl. These garments accompany the paintings. Through the making of these objects, I get to create clothes which I feel the most unbounded within, contrasting the ways in which I was bound in pink and frilly dresses before I could make my own decisions. The ironic part is that I feel most unbound in the same aesthetics of femininity that I was exposed to as a young girl, reminiscent of holiday dresses and dance costumes. It is as if these garments are able to hit at the child-like freedom and happiness that was only possible when I was that young; when I would play dress-up and dance around my parents’ living room to pop music.
To emphasize the fleetingness and intangible quality of these topics, I have also incorporated elements of video and sound in my installations of these objects. I have found that these experiences call to something on the edge of spiritual and transcendental for me, so I have begun a process recording my voice in which I am reading excerpts from my journal, placed on top of distorted elements of songs and sounds recorded within my bedroom. The accompanying videos are also distorted and enhanced in abstract ways to create something more of a memory quality, something stuck in time and out of reach.
Altogether, this work has allowed me to make peace with certain past traumas and to move forward with something more hopeful and truly at the heart of what I hope to continue to work with in the future. The beginnings of this body of work is definitely the most proud that I have been within my studio practice so far, and I am eager to keep going.
What makes you happy?
I am most happy when I am around people who I love and who share the same ideals as me. I have realized how important companionship is after spending a lot of time alone during the pandemic, so I have tried to make as much time as I can to share time with the people that are in my life.
I find happiness in spending time outside; running has been my favorite hobby and a crucial part of my routine over the last 3 years and has helped to keep me grounded. I also love baking and making food for my family and the other people in my life and sharing that time with them.
Contact Info:
- Website: erindellasega.myportfolio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erindellasega/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqjNYx9-mgW5e8b64HuJrwQ
Image Credits
Erin Dellasega
