The Walleye Ride, Build, and Belong (Vol. 17:8)
The Walleye's Ride, Build, and Belong – Vol. 17:8 (pub. 01/08.2026)
Journalist Sidney Ulakovic interviewed Erin for this issue of the Walleye in advance of their first commercial solo exhibition. Several works from the show are exhibited across the 2-page spread, as well as quotes from the artist on the topic.
The Walleye THE TATTOO ISSUE (Vol. 17:6)
The Walleye's THE TATTOO ISSUE – Vol. 17:6 (pub. 01/06.2026)
As someone with several permanent works on their skin, I have come to view tattoos as personal symbols that help one unveil or become themselves. This is the same lens through which I view artist Pena Bonita’s Old bones, Old designs (1984).
In a closely cropped frame, this sun-bleached skull, hung on a cracked tree, stares outward, as if resigned. The skull may have formerly served as a warning to trespassers, decorated someone’s landscape, or been positioned for this photograph. The artist layers gentle yellow, pink, and blue hues to soften this stark scene, including a design of a serpent on the lower half of the skull. This design likely contains history, knowledge, and intent that I am not privy to; it reminds me of the modest tattoo of an ant on my arm. Stick-and-poked by a friend, this was one of the first times I did not seek permission from others; the small tattoo was my decision, and I even paid for it with one of my own paintings instead of cash. Like Bonita’s artistic process, there is purpose and conviction in accumulating layers. The materials and imagery added over the original photograph help create the resulting work of art.
Pena Bonita (Apache, Seminole) was born in 1948 and grew up in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. From the age of seventeen, she worked in nightclubs and found her way to New York. It was here that Bonita pursued college to study art history and studio practice. Though cautioned by those around her against incorporating “Native” themes, the artist did so anyway. With a body of work resisting clear definition, she pursues what feels right across her comics, collages, photographs, and paintings. Reflecting on my own tattoos, Bonita shows us how change does not always have to be explained to enrich the greater picture.
This article was written by Community Engagement Educator Erin with proofing by Curator Penelope Smart on behalf of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
Drain Magazine THE GARDEN (Vol. 19:2)
Drain Magazine's THE GARDEN – Vol. 19:2 (ed. by Celina Jeffery; pub. 01/01/2024)
On the curatorial project Planting Roses in January.
The Garden asks how expanded forms of gardening, whether that be gardening as research-creation, ‘feral’ art practice, fostering new communities, addressing mental health, and, or resistance to capital all interact with the ever-challenging effects of climate change. Here the ‘garden’ may be considered to engender the co-production of care, activating communities alike in their struggle to address the intersectional challenges of the present and build new futures. In what ways can gardening shed its Western bias and become the basis of creative engagement and evaluation to insert meaning into the experience of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing, 2017)? Can gardening become an agent of action, capable of negotiating the overwhelming sense of anxiety and paralysis that emerges from a confrontation with the collapse of planetary systems?
This issue of Drain is also inspired by the queer activist, filmmaker, and artist Derek Jarman and his concept of ‘modern nature’. Partly articulated in his garden project at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, UK, a coastal site adjacent to a nuclear facility, ‘modern nature’ pushes boundaries and collaborative status between gardening as rewilding nature, time, and contamination (Jarman 1991; Laing 2020). Jarman’s concepts intersect with narratives of care, of bodies in despair, grief, but also of the possibilities of entangled futures. As such, we welcome a range of intersecting queer, feminist, post-colonial, and Indigenous perspectives to explore the ethical and ontological raised through vibrant material and symbolic exchanges that operate at the site of the garden. such a collision of territories in which we confront the cultural separation of human and more-than-human dwellings allow for an exploration of the distorted and abused connections that have shaped our experiences of ‘modern nature’?
An excerpt is shared from the catalog print that Erin co-collaborated on with Shems Benmosbah, Elie Crighton, Chris Glabb, Isabelle Gray, Dana Mehdipour-Haidari, and Kelseigh Thompson.