Artist Interview: Erica Daborn

In Dialogues with Mother Earth: Drawing to Save the Planet, 𝐄𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐃𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 uses her art as a socially transformative tool to generate positive change by capturing the attention of the public via 13 large-scale charcoal-on-canvas murals. Each artwork opens a discussion about a series of critical issues facing the planet and our respective roles as participants in creating change. Issues like the culture of consumerism and waste, the food crisis, endangered species, and climate change are presented via scenes of ambiguous characters that blur race, culture, and borders.

Since 2016, the murals from Dialogues With Mother Earth have been exhibited in eight major museums in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri; the International Museum of Art and Science in McAllen, Texas; Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts; Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; Centro de Las Artes de San Luis Potosí in San Luis Potosí, Mexico; Museo de Ciudad de Querétaro in Querétaro, Mexico; Museo Iconográfico del Quijote in Guanajuato, Mexico; and El Centro Nigromante Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Shannon Frazeur, communications coordinator at the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, interviewed Daborn to learn some of the more intimate details surrounding the exhibition.

Shannon: Tell me your name and the name of your exhibition.

Erica: My name is Erica Daborn and the exhibition here is called Dialogues with Mother Earth: Drawing to Save the Planet.

S: Can you tell me about the overall idea behind the exhibition and the themes that you explored?

E: The project started back in 2010. I had been on a sabbatical from my teaching job in Boston in Mexico and I suddenly became very overwhelmed with the idea that the environment around us, which was beautiful and nourishing, was gradually being decimated by issues around climate change. And I was teaching at the time and a lot of young people would—we would talk about artworks and stuff—and then the conversation would nearly always go to, “Well we’re hearing all this stuff about extinction of species and climate change and it seems like nobody’s doing anything.” And at that point I thought, “Well, what can I do? I really want to do something.” The only thing I knew anything about was to make art, so I began this project really early on—it had a different format to start with—it was going to be more of an experiential, interactive installation, but I started to make the drawings because that was the easiest part—the part I knew how to do. Basically, the whole idea was to put the viewer way in the future, sort of looking back. Murals have always been traditionally for recording historical events, so it was the idea that we were looking and these were historical events and things that had happened.And gradually that kind of got momentum, people started various exhibitions, spaces started to want them…We would show the first six, and then there’d be eight and then there’d be 9. I would make one a year for thirteen years. Now we have the thirteen.

S: Are you planning a fourteenth work?

E: That’s a very interesting question. I finished this last one, “The Caravan,” last year (in 2023). And I’m actually moving my whole studio location. I’m moving back from Mexico to the U.S., and so the whole thing…and also someone who is helping me find venues for the murals, she’s moved and gone to live in Finland. So it’s sort of like in a period where everything’s changing, as things do, and I’m probably going to start making some other work related to the environment in some way or humanist issues. I think this is done now. Thirteen seems like a good number, yeah.

S: I want to talk a little bit about the medium that you chose…So all of these are charcoal on canvas. Why did you pick that medium for this project?

E: That’s a good question. Well, I taught drawing primarily for 20 years at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, so drawing was a big focus of mine and working with students in drawing. I also discovered in other things that this ground that I’m using allowed me to erase very clearly. I could make a lot of changes. So the physicality of the charcoal over this textured ground allowed me to develop ideas very freely. Charcoal drawing normally on paper is quite hard to erase. This medium allowed me to try things. I could try this, I could change that if something’s not working. So the physical process became very seductive. I didn’t want to do anything that was on stretchers. I didn’t want to do anything that had to be framed. All those things are expensive, so the idea of a canvas that could be rolled up and then we discovered that we could roll these and ship them very cheaply…The whole thing just became the right material, the right format for something like this, and it allowed me to make these very big pieces because I could roll them up. So the facility of it was part of it and the actual process involved with the charcoal was perfect.

S: Do you use a fixative?

E: Yeah, that’s actually the worst part of it. So, yeah, they have to be fixed using traditional, you know, fixative. It involves a respirator, getting the cat out of the studio, blocking everything off, doing it…eight cans of fixative spray. There’s dust all over. It leaves a kind of residue, so you have to clean that up. It’s a very unpleasant part of it, but yeah, that’s the only way. And then they hold up well.

S: So one of the notable things about these works is their size. What was the idea or thought process behind that?

E: Basically related to the idea of traditional, historical murals. So in the initial project we were working on, they would actually end up looking as if they were drawn on the wall. That was the idea of the textured surface and then the relationship of primitive drawing—you know, the idea of the cave drawings. The most primitive material is charcoal—burnt sticks, you know. So that relationship was there too initially and it just kind of morphed gradually into a different theme.

S: What was the first venue for this exhibition?

E: The first venue was Clark University in Massachusetts.

S: Can you talk about some of the other venues?

E: So it started off at Clark University. We didn’t have that many up there. Students helped me hang them. That was a kind of funny experience. I think the next one was at the International Museum of Art and Science in McAllen, Texas on the border there. A big show. We did all that were finished then—I can’t remember how many that was at the time. Then they’ve been to four different museums in Mexico because I live in Mexico. They were also shown at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri. And I was always pushing to find venues that were not in the sort of major, metropolitan areas or the normal “high art” museums—not that I would object to them being displayed in a big museum in New York, but I really wanted them to go out into various parts of the country and to different people and to try to talk about this as an international think that’s happening, you know? It’s not just the U.S., it’s not just Mexico—it’s everywhere. And part of my interest in trying to make the characters seem somewhat nonspecific in regards to where they’re from is a part of it too.

S: How has the artwork evolved from the first one that you did to this last one?

E: That’s a good question. Yeah, I’m not sure. I think each one is very much its own thing. Each one was pointing at a different topic. The first one was really about saving animals very broadly. Then we have one that was about meat eating because the beef industry is highly polluting and uses an enormous amount of energy to make one pound of meat. So each one had a different thing. Let’s see, what can we do about seeds—genetic modification. So each time I would have a thought about where I can explore. The biggest part, the difficult thing is trying to find imagery because you’re trying to have a conversation rather than trying to “illustrate,” you know? So that when you look at them you’re not sure what you think or what’s going on, but you have to investigate as a viewer. So that becomes the most difficult thing. If you try to illustrate, then it’s like, “I want you to know this. You should receive this. You should think this.” I don’t want to do that. It must be about a conversation, so that’s really the task of the project. How do you really get people thinking about these things without being kind of dictatorial?

S: What do you want people to take away from this exhibition?

E: I want people to just go, “Oh, I never really thought about that.” or “Oh, I get it.” “Yeah, that’s important,” or “I could make some change there. I never thought about it before, but now maybe I will do this or not do that.” So hopefully it will create some small change in people. So as these things get worse—which they are everywhere…more and more catastrophic climate events—it’s no surprise and it’s not like “Why doesn’t somebody else do something about this?” We all have to do something about it in our own way. So I see it as an educational project.

S: Can you talk about some of your artistic influences?

E: Well, I was very lucky. I grew up in a household where my father was an artist and he taught art in art school and he met my mother in art school, so that was the norm in my household. My dad would always be in his studio and when he wasn’t working, painting away, he’d bring his artwork into the house to kind of keep looking at it. A very early experience of mine—I remember him saying when I said, “Oh I’m bored. What should I do?” He said, “You should never be bored. Do some drawing.” So I was very lucky. I went to art school at a very early age—I went to art school at 16. I completed 7 years of higher education in art, including at the Royal College of Art in London. So that was there for me—I was supported, and I was very lucky in England. Because of my family’s circumstances, I didn’t have to pay anything for higher education. So I had a lot of support in many ways to continue making art. I was very lucky—I got teaching jobs, I got a master’s degree—all of that helped me. Now in terms of art influences, my father—my father’s work—and my father being very interested in the British artist Stanley Spencer, who made these very complex figurative compositions. Later when I went to art school, my tutors were all into German Expressionism, Max Beckmann, George Gross, those guys. So that was another figurative kind of experience. And on I think from there I was always interested in the idea of activism, but I always thought most artwork that was about politics or social issues was kind of not very good artwork. So I never really went that way with my own work and it wasn’t until I started making this and I saw that interest of mine come together with my actual art process.

I was trying to find a way to talk about these issues in a very accessible way. I think of these as stories—visual stories—you know, you can enter into them and go “Oh, what’s that?” The whole idea of talking about climate change and bombarding people with scientific facts doesn’t change people’s thinking at all. “Oh my god, the sea levels are going to rise. What does that mean?” All it does is sort of terrify people. So this was a way of trying to have this dialogue, this conversation in an accessible way and maybe things come out of that. I’m hoping here in the museum, you’re going to do these programming events and people will get pulled into participating and thinking, “Well, where am I in all of this?” So that’s the idea. Accessibility to the issues.

S: Do you have anything else that you want to make sure to talk about?

E: One thing I’d like to make clear is that I’ve had some financial support from different organizations, including the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. I’ve been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts fiscal sponsorship program. Those have been very important. Also residencies have helped move the project along. When you get that kind of affirmation from foundations or whatever, it helps it get to the next stage, so that’s been very important. The other thing is that my husband’s a filmmaker who has been enormously helpful with everything to do with technology and recording video, which has helped get the project out there. So I’ve had help from people, and I wanted to acknowledge that.

I’m very excited that the work is here at ASC. I think it looks absolutely brilliant—the way it’s been hung—beautiful installation and I’m very excited about how it’s going to become kind of a central location to bring in lots of students and people from all over the area. That’s just terrific.

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This one is called “S.O.S. (Save Our Seeds).” It started from an idea that I wanted to do something about plants. Climate change changed the relationship of plants to temperature and water and all of that. However, when I started to just draw plants—a lot of what happens is, I can’t just draw anything. I have to find things that I want to draw. And so I tried to do something about plants, but I could not engage with the idea of leaves or flowers. So once I started to think about “Well, what about seeds?” because of seeds and genetic modification…I was just entranced by the forms of seeds. So this is what this one happened around.Yeah, I want to draw these seeds. Let’s just find a venue. We want to try and save them, so the idea of getting into a boat and sailing off…There’s a big seed bank I think in Norway or Sweden—a huge international seed bank—and these guys are sailing off—and they are actually all women…And the characters in them are just a different group of women. And this lady here was based on a very famous Indian, a climate activist. Basically, that was the idea…talking about plants, specifically finding seeds as a form I wanted to draw.

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This is the last mural I did. I finished it last year. It’s called “Caravan.” It’s really focusing on what is the outcome of all this climate change? Because I live in Mexico, over the last few years, we’ve had enormous caravans of people moving, coming up through Mexico from El Salvador and Guatemala and up into the United States. And there have been a lot of conversations about migrants and illegal aliens and it seemed to me that this is what is happening now, all over the world—people are moving because of climate change. They are upending their lives. They are trying to find a new safe location—somewhere where they can get work, they can keep their families, and I’m trying to make an image about that. I wanted to make it kind of broader about all kind of relocation, so these are not just people coming from Africa or Mexico or Guatemala—it’s the idea that there’s an upheaval worldwide and people are having to rethink their lives and find a way to find homes, find work, look after their families, and it’s the idea that it taps in also historically to things like the U.S. depression, historically people always having to move when times are bad—all kinds of people from different situations. What is it also to always be carrying stuff—trying to examine that. Also if you look at the labels, there’s the tradition of…for example, during the second World War in the U.K., children were sent to the countryside and they had labels put on them. I also noticed with the internment of the Japanese in the U.S., there are pictures of them with labels. It’s tapping into a number of different previous events around relocation.

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So this is “Funeral for the Last Elephant.” This is the second mural that I did. It was focusing specifically on extinction of species—well how do you do that, right? So, it seemed that people are upset about the idea of extinction of species—you know, the whole polar bear thing—but what are we doing? So the idea here was “How do I make some kind of visual image here? Well, a celebration or people mourn when things go away. What are they doing to stop them going away?” So here, this was actually an image of a dead elephant that had been shot by a hunter…and the idea of a celebration, a spectacle, an event. And I feel like a lot of, especially in the U.S., the publicity of like an event and then we’re on to the next thing. So that was part of it. You’ve got these mourners here and animals are mourning. It’s a little bit more of a fantastical image than some of the later ones.

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This one is called “The Rescue.” I wanted to make one about flooding. With climate change, there’s been a lot of floods where people haven’t had them as seriously before. Well, drawing water isn’t that easy. And the idea again was of rescuing, which goes back a little bit to the earlier ones… “Are we going to rescue? What are we going to rescue? Are we going to rescue animals?” So it’s mostly about trying to show the idea of rescuing animals, rescuing creatures somehow from flooding. Women as carrying creatures—there are a lot of women in all of these murals.

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This one is called “Water.” It’s one of the later ones. I think for a lot of people in the West, we don’t value water as much as some people in desert countries. I live in Mexico and I live off the grid. From living off the grid, I’ve become very aware of how much people waste water, especially in the U.S. People run the tap constantly, they do their dishes under running water…That led me to think about this as more of a worldwide thing—the importance of water. Without water, we don’t exist. Nothing exists without water. Going back to the idea of being in the future and now everybody’s on a water shortage and it’s being rationed and you get a little number and when your number comes up, you get some water and you better bring something to put it in. And this is actually happening in many parts of the world. They don’t have water or they may have water in short bursts a few times a day or a few times a week. Where I live in Mexico, the water is in the surrounding towns…it’s highly polluted. There is arsenic in the water, which is terrible for children’s health. And I wanted to make an image that would bring people to thinking about this. So hopefully these are people from different orientations and geographical locations and they’re all together worrying about the water.

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Learn more about Erica and her work on her website https://www.ericadaborn.com/.

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