My artwork is inspired by forgotten or discarded photographs and objects from the past. This inspiration often manifests itself directly, as I make pictures derived from these remnants of other people’s lives and experiences which I have no memory of or connection to. The action of working with these artifacts becomes a kind of séance and storytelling. I look deep into the gloss of the photograph to call upon the voices of those faces gazing back from decades past to guide me as I draw. I hold the artifacts, feeling for the touch of hands that held these objects before.

The subjects I choose come from lost moments, now orphaned from the individual histories that created them. A photo is a mirrored recording of light and shadow that someone once found to be significant enough to press open the shutter for a fraction of a second. This results in a gathering of glances, from photographer to subject together towards the future. For every photograph, however, there comes a moment when the significance of the picture has drained and no longer holds clarity for those who will come to possess it later. This is where I step in, gathering the evidence together to manifest new meaning and stories from what they show me.

Heirloom is a collection of drawings, found objects and assemblages that emerged from my conversations with some of these artifacts. The images represent a series of events that I seek to describe over time, with each new image contributes another detail to an unfolding story. Making this work has become like drawing a novel. I collect evidence and motifs begin to emerge, recurrent characters, and places are woven visually to create a narrative about the complicated lives of the people depicted therein. It began with a couple gazing through the camera lens looking at one another from either side of the apparatus, and then towards me, now looking back and translating what they have told me into a sequence of marks to share with a viewer.

The materials and manner of drawing, painting, and collecting is intended echo the lives I witness through this dialogue. The artworks begin as dusty, worn, incomplete, bleached, stained, and made with materials from the earth. The people I’m portraying are earnest, proud gritty and as wild as the land they worked upon. The cold prairie winds whistled through the cracks in the walls of their house uninvited, day and night. In the winter, all the family curled up in a single bed in the home to keep warm. Neighbors were miles away and the night was a black rock looming over them. The only noises they heard were their own breath, the soft wheedle of country song from the radio, the wind through the brush, or the insects and birds cackling about. There may be whispers, too, because the past is always filled with muffled voices and stories that can’t be remembered.

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All my artworks examine our relationship to a past version of something that is now inaccessible. I’m compelled by the abundance of possibilities in this uncertainty and in subjects that resist being deciphered. A photograph is not a recollection, after all, but it feels like a memory and is saturated with the slippery feeling of looking back. A photograph is a mirage of memories where one can get close, but the distance is always expanding in front of you.

I think about distance often; Distance over land, through time, across the picture plane, between bodies, and from the pores of one’s skin to microcosm inside. I seek to compress notions of near and far, then and now, reality and dream, and you and I into a picture where those distances become indeterminate and simultaneous. By making distance flat, we can contact anyone, anywhere, all the time. We can share a visitation across the picture plane, connecting the past to the present and the future on upon a single surface. There, we can reach that shimmering silver band of mercury at the end of the highway on a hot day.

--Erin Cunningham, 2025

Questions can be directed to erincunningham.artist@gmail.com

All images on this website are property of the artist

2025