Artist Member
How To Build A Community installation
Mixed media
12 x 18’
NH Storytellers
Trace monotypes on curtains, hand and machine sewn; cardboard; hand cut paper; steel
30 x 24 x 12”
Storytellers
Mixed media, various printing and binding techniques
Each figure is approximately 24 x 10 x 12”, depending on display
Erin Sweeney 
erinsweeney.net
BIO
Erin Sweeney lives and works in southern New Hampshire. She received her MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she was awarded the Elizabeth C. Roberts Prize for Graduate Book Arts. She also has a BFA in Sculpture from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.
Sweeney exhibits nationally, most recently at the Lyceum Gallery at the Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire, Unrequited Leisure in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Thorne-Sagendorph Gallery at Keene State College, Keene, New Hampshire. In July, Sweeney was awarded a Ruth and James Ewing Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Additionally, Sweeney is an instructor, teaching book arts workshops at her Lovely In The Home Press. She also travels to teach workshops at many locales, including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Stone House, the University of Southern Maine’s Book Arts Intensive; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cló Ceardlann in Donegal, Ireland, and the Philadelphia Center for the Book. She is a member of the NH State Council on the Arts’ Artist Roster, and is Assistant Professor in Foundations and Printmaking at the Institute of Art and Design at New England College.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
The sense of belonging to a particular landscape and community has always been present in my work. So far, I’ve lived at twenty-one different addresses, not including the separate list of places where my dad lived after my parents’ divorce. Transitioning between my parents’ houses for years left me with a keen ability to make a space my own. I also developed a distinct distaste for waiting, and a desire to stay put.
In each place I’ve lived, I’ve put down roots no matter how temporary the address.
When I was in kindergarten in Peterborough, each day we would go play outside, or if it was raining we played in the amazing red barn. Mrs. Brous had the barn set up in an oval, with a “track” for our tricycles and pogo sticks. In the center were cardboard houses, shops, and other structures, our own little community. I loved that barn and I loved kindergarten. I belonged there.
For six weeks each summer, I traveled to Ireland with my dad and my brother, to the house he bought for 6,000 dollars. I would pack my clothes, and enough stuff to “outfit” my room like a bowerbird–cassettes, art supplies, photos, an empty bottle of White Linen, which then was my mother’s perfume.
When I was 29, I inadvertently moved back home. I moved to a drafty house where it felt like I was heating a tent, but I had a roaring fire every night in my beautiful fireplace. I slept with a hat on in winter and couldn’t use the oven because of the mice, my studio was the sunny glassed-in front porch, and I had an outdoor shower, which I loved. Here I learned to garden with my mom, by making lots of mistakes, and was reminded of what life in a small town is like.
Throughout my career I’ve been creating private and public spaces within “galleries” that invite visitors to think about their own idea of home and the architecture or landscape associated with it. The work for this exhibit started with a simple writing assignment I completed in 2008 that listed all the addresses where I’ve lived. I started a taxonomy of images based on ten of the locations, which resulted in one hundred pieces of work. In these new pieces, I am exploring the abstracted memories, sounds, and smells of these places. I am considering landscape, the things we carry, the memories of the people at these addresses, and what I would bring with me if I had to leave my home suddenly.
I think often about the place I might live in the future.