My life is a thread unending
My life is a thread unending
an electric shock of discovery
I hasten to fall –
a sea of tears is my safe landing
A thread is threefold: a filament connecting disparate parts; a lineage; a train of thought that you follow through its variations of woven, braided, spun, twisted, knotted, dangling. The most poignant thread being that creating art is my antidote to melancholia–a state of sadness, depression, despair–it is the center of the way that I process and understand and live with hope in the world.
Left to right: 1. The Whole Body: Blood. 2. The Communication. 3. Following the thread, the veins, the river. 4. My life is a thread unending I. Original works by Erin Coleman Serrano 2026.
Since giving birth to my children I experience this absurd-awkward-delicate-sublime tension existing in the threads between my body and spirit. First birthing, then living a life with children, upends a mother’s body and her brain. My art-making brings me glimpses of comprehension for daily experiences such as the ferocity of protection and care I have for my deep-feeling children, yet the discomfort of over-touch to my body, a nervous system shudder to all their demands, extreme love for my small humans, sublime wonder for how fast and in what they learn.
Left to Right: 1. Luna's orange dress. 2. her hair, my hair. 3. Luna's orange and black dress.
Although many of my motifs and media center around garments and the construction of clothing, this artwork is not about fashion or adorning the body, but rather, about the story told through the absence of the body which leaves behind an essence or spirit in the clothing. It becomes a memorial of experiences found in paper dolls, fashion plates, dresses, dressforms, threads, teardrops, maps, riverbeds. The materiality of my work is a shifting current, fluidly moving between media: delicate paper pulp, drypoint intaglio, monoprints, cyanotype blue prints, stitching, and thread to help express a visual of my inner experience.
Left to Right: 1. Unraveling: to dust. Cyanotype blueprint of a drypoint intaglio print.2. Work in progress showing the matrix, intaglio print.
The abstraction found in my ealier images has shifted towards literal storytelling about being a professional artist and mother. I am using drypoint intaglio for its immediacy as a medium combined with slower fiber techniques of stitching and weaving. I use upcycled TetraPak cartons to print most of my designs in this show–they can be quickly drawn and incised onto the foiled packaging, and then using my small etching press I can rapidly run a small edition of prints. Although I am a midcareer artist, in many ways I am starting over in the way that women artists often take a career hiatus out of circumstances that demand time, energy, and focus away from their artwork and towards their children and families. I slowed production, never stopped working, but needed to be able to make a complete artwork in one sitting. It was in the drypoint intaglio process that I discovered a medium that allows me that expression.
