Career arc brings sculptor Erin Shirreff back to the site of her inspiration
Apr. 26—When Erin Shirreff moved to Santa Fe in 1998, she was a recent college graduate searching for an entry into the art world. And now, several years later, she's a sculptor featured in an exhibition at the same institution where she once worked as an intern.
Shirreff's show, Folded Stone, is at SITE Santa Fe through May 27, and it includes both three-dimensional wall art and sculptures that were fabricated or cast at a foundry. One large piece made from angular planes of aluminum bolted together on two seams dominates the center of the room it's in. Her other sculptures in the exhibit are smaller bronze casts of maquettes she made from foamcore and cardboard.
Shirreff, who is now based in Montreal, Canada, was born and raised in British Columbia, Canada. She was drawn to art from an early age, she says, and her ambition to be an artist developed when she was studying for her bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Victoria. After graduation, she joined the team at SITE in the publications department and says her time in Santa Fe made a huge difference in her trajectory.
details
Erin Shirreff's Folded Stone
* Through May 27
* SITE Santa Fe
* 1606 Paseo de Peralta
* Free
* 505-989-1199; sitesantafe.org
"I had a very vestigial understanding of art and contemporary art at that point, and [moving to Santa Fe] was a very transformative experience," she says. "I was coming from Canada, and I was just becoming an adult. I was only 20 and was at a museum that had very ambitious programming and intentions for their exhibitions. I was working with very high-level artists and curators, and I just sort of soaked it up."
For three years, Shirreff had a front-row seat for the behind-the-scenes action of putting together an exhibition.
In 2001, she followed her own muse to New York, and two years later she started studying for an MFA at Yale University. She graduated in 2005, taking a much-needed break between her undergraduate and graduate degrees.
"I had a really important five years between the two," she says. "I used to think that everybody should have a break, but everyone goes through their lives in whatever way makes sense. I know that now. But I don't really see the point in rushing through to grad school. For me, it was a chance to take myself out of regular life and re-commit to my practice — stop my life and take myself seriously."
Shirreff says she's worked in a variety of mediums over the years, from photography to sculpture. Before she started working with foundries, she presided over every part of the sculpting process.
She worked with cast plaster previously but also sculpted out of ash before she started working with metal. The large sculpture — the attention-grabber — was fabricated out of aluminum by Versteeg Art Fabricators, a company based in Connecticut. Shirreff says the sculpture was brought into the museum in three parts through the loading dock and bolted together on site.
"It's 3/4 -inch-thick plates of aluminum. But it's very stable," she says. "When you first enter the space from the gray room and see it, it appears very three dimensional. But as you walk around it, it folds into space and becomes very thin and attenuated. Even though it does look very thin and almost digital from some perspectives, it is very heavy and solid."
The challenge of working on a piece that big is that she doesn't know what it will look and feel like until she's standing next to it, so she works on a smaller prototype before sending it to be fabricated.
"I definitely have made things in my studio where I've realized halfway through that I need to hire an assistant because I'm not going be able to lift it," she says. "I've painted myself into a corner in that way a couple times."
As for her bronze casts, Shirreff says her sculptures start in foamcore and cardboard and then are taken to a foundry, which, for her smaller pieces, is at the Urban Art Project in Rock Tavern, New York. The small sculptures are made by a process called sandcasting, and Shirreff says she doesn't enlarge or miniaturize the designs she sends to the foundry.
"I start taping and gluing things together in my studio like a three-dimensional drawing," she says of her maquettes. "For any given sculpture, there's many iterations in various stages and sizes.
"The thing that's great about working small is I can see what something looks like without having the material translation. I can't see it in bronze, but I can see what it will feel like with my body because it will be the same size."
