episode thirty-seven | ericka walker

Published 31 march 2020

Miranda Metcalf  

Hello print friends, and welcome to the 37th episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I hope you all are keeping healthy, staying home, and sleeping well. If your quarantine days have been anything like mine, they have been the longest, shortest time of my life. So there's not much housekeeping today since it's only been a week since we last talked, but just let me say thank you so so much to Pine Copper Lime Patreon supporters. I know these are uncertain times, and it means the world that you are still looking out for your buddies over at PCL. I also want to give a particularly grateful shout out to our sponsor, Mesh Art Gallery in Chicago. Bernard and Jessica have been longtime, big time PCL supporters. And it really truly helps keep the lights on here in a very uncertain world. Mesh shows beautiful prints from contemporary printmakers around the world, so I highly suggest you treat yourself and take a look at their catalogue. Link in the show notes, naturally. My guest this week is Ericka Walker. Ericka has been on my list to talk to since back when PCL was just a twinkle in my eye. Ericka's lithographs are unmistakable. Drawn from 20th century propaganda imagery and historical documents, she creates a visual mixtape of North America's past glories and hubris. She's an artist who thinks deeply about the why and the how of going about creating her works and speaks eloquently, letting us into her process. In this interview, you're going to hear about how ideas of class, the value of labor, and her corporeal experience all inform of the incredible work that she does. The release of this interview was supposed to coincide with the opening of an exhibition at Megalo Print Studio in Canberra, Australia, which paired Ericka's lithographs with the work of Katie Mutton and Megalo's archive of historical protest posters, but, well, you've been around the past couple of weeks, you can probably figure out what happened. We are hoping, though, to get a digital exhibition up in the next few days, if not the next week. And when that goes through, I will certainly promote that over the Pine Copper Lime Instagram (@helloprintfriend), as well as the newsletter. So if you're not already following me on those and you'd like to, head on over to helloprintfriend.com to sign up. One last ask before I hand things over to Ericka: if you find yourself a little extra time this week - heh - please take a moment to rate and review PCL on your podcast app of choice. Or maybe just share it with another printmaker. It really does make a difference. You all are amazing. There would not be a PCL without you. Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. Over FaceTime. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and prepare to roll up your sleeves with Ericka Walker. Hi, Ericka. How's it going?

Ericka Walker  Hey, Miranda, it's been a good day here and a good evening so far. How are you?

Miranda Metcalf  I'm good, I'm good. Well, I think I first really became aware of your work in an exhibition at an SGCI. But you know, your work is so distinctive and striking, that first definitely piqued my interest in you and what you're doing, and then just kind of followed a bit of your work. And of course we chatted with some mutual friends on Pine Copper Lime, like Jill Graham, and of course, the good folks at Landfall as well. And so you've been on my list to talk to as well for quite some time. But for people who don't know you, would you mind [answering] what have now started to become my classic introductory questions of who you are and where you are and what do you do?

Ericka Walker  Right. No problem. Well first, thank you, Miranda, for the invite. It's an honor to be amongst your roster. It's a great program, a great podcast, I really have enjoyed it over the last couple years. So thank you. I'm Ericka Walker. I'm a visual artist, primarily an image maker. The majority of those images are prints. And I am also an educator. I'm a professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, otherwise known as NSCAD. I'm a mother and a spouse, and Nova Scotia still doesn't quite feel like my homeland. I've been here for eight years almost. I'm a Midwesterner. I'm from the US. I'm a citizen, born and raised in Wisconsin.

Miranda Metcalf  So I know that you say you're an image maker, that's primarily lithography, but you also do some murals, some large scale paintings as well, and I'd love to touch on both. But since we are a printmaking podcast, can you tell me how you came to be a printmaker, and maybe specifically even a lithographer?

Ericka Walker  Yeah, I have a... I don't know, kind I guess, a quaint story about how I came to printmaking, maybe not too dissimilar from a lot of your other guests in kind of happening upon it by chance. I was attending university in Central Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. And I didn't go with the intention of studying art, but took a drawing class for enrichment. My drawing professor was a fella named Bob Erickson, and Bob Erickson is an artist that lives, I believe he's in upstate New York now, but he was also the printmaking professor and kind of recruited me to take some print classes. So I enrolled in his etching class having no real idea what this printmaking was. At some point, in that first class, I kind of remembered this Encyclopedia of art books that my parents had when I was growing up. And in the back of these books, past the color plates, of course, in the black and white image section, which was usually very skipped over, there were these images called etchings or lithographs, and they looked like drawings. So as I grew older, I was still kind of attracted to them, but couldn't figure out, what is this etching, lithography? What does relief mean? And yeah, so there was this moment where that kind of clicked, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, cool.' And of course, there were example prints up on the wall. And I think that really did it for me, more so than all of the accoutrements and all of the materials and tools and presses and inks, was seeing what could be done. And I think that is something as an educator that I think about a lot is, you know, sometimes it has nothing to do necessarily with what I'm teaching, or how I'm demoing, or how excited I am about printmaking. But sometimes, those really great moments for a student can just be looking at what we put up on the wall as examples. So yeah, I was very attracted to what was possible in the medium. And, of course, Bob was an excellent professor. He had a great, great balance of areas of encouragement, from technical to conceptual. And I think what was also happening around that time was I, during the summers, was doing very labor intensive jobs. I worked at a metal foundry for a while in my teenage years and into my 20s and was doing also a lot of landscaping. And so something was happening, which was basically, I was learning that I enjoyed labor. I don't think I really framed it that way at the time. But looking back I can see very clearly, like, yeah, repetitive movements, sort of coordinating and synthesizing my body to work with different tools, was really attractive to me.

Miranda Metcalf  Which fits in very nicely with the physicality of printmaking.

Ericka Walker  Yeah. And who would have thought that my summer jobs, and then later, some of my full time jobs would mirror so perfectly what I was doing in the printmaking studio? Of course, when I went to graduate school, I realized that... you know, you have to think about everything 100 times, over and that kind of... it was like, 'Oh yeah, what I was doing on a construction site, or even in that metal foundry, some of what was attractive about that is what I find enjoyable in the print studio.' And there's flexibility in it too, especially if you're working with materials like stone or soil or gravel, there's different ways to use different tools to get different desired outcomes, I guess.

Miranda Metcalf  I think that's a really lovely thing to point out, that idea of these summer jobs informing what eventually became your art practice and your professional practice. Because so often, I think we're told - and I say sort of "we" as this educated middle class Americans - that if you're working in, let's say, a foundry or something, or landscaping while you're in your undergrad, the narrative is "Don't pay too much attention to that, this isn't for you. You're just getting by, your destiny is for the mind." And I think the implication is, "Because you're better than that. Because you're going to go be thinkers." And that is such a non-constructive way of thinking about things. That we're told to compartmentalize our lives, from the mind to the body.

Ericka Walker  Right. I remember, I was doing a residency in Mexico, and I had shared with somebody there that at the time, I was an assistant professor, I was in academia, but prior to that, I was looking at a potentially happy career doing highway construction. And they were amazed with the polarity of those two worlds, like, 'Wow, that's really rare for that to happen here.' You know, they were really talking about that shift in my profession as something that was almost transcendental, like people don't move up the ladder that way. And yeah, I think that's a really unfortunate way of thinking. But you're right, yeah, we were definitely kind of groomed to sort of keep that, yeah, "That's for summer work. That's not for you." Especially when it comes to something dirty and gritty and laborious. I imagine we could get to... that conversation really interests me, that paradigm that you're talking about. I feel like I'm still, you know, 10 years into this - I guess I'm thinking about from graduating graduate school. And now I guess it's 2020, it's been 10 years, I've been a quote unquote "professional" for that long. - But yeah, I still am reluctant to leave that world behind. I still long for it and carry a great deal of respect for the people that I worked with, and the way that they solved problems and the way that they had a relationship with the work that they did. And how, if, and when that got brought into the rest of their lives, whether it was a work ethic, or an ethos, or just a way of understanding the world. And that's kind of where... that's especially where the mural work has gone. Now, I guess the print work that I do as well. I'm frequently looking to the sort of pastoral setting of of my childhood and upbringing. And those summers and those seasons working outside. And there's a lot there.

Miranda Metcalf  There definitely is, and I'm kind of, I'm sort of resisting asking this question, because I just think it could take up the entire rest of our time together. But this idea that I'm always curious about is, what are the structures in place that lead us to have these beliefs? That labor isn't for you, because you're an educated person, you're an artist, you're of the mind and the spirit, not of the earthly vessel. That people would be so surprised that you could be thinking about a career as a construction worker and a career as an artist, and that you would even be considering the life of the physical? It's something that I think we kind of take for granted, but I'm always interested in the why, like, why is that? Despite just ingrained kind of classism and constantly trying to set ourselves apart. And of course, the irony of that is, the person who's more likely to be a millionaire on your block in the suburbs is not your art professor, it's your plumber. But of course, you know, class isn't just your paycheck.

Ericka Walker  Well, it's such a great question. And I'm curious about it, too. I work with some really great contemporary scholars, I'd like to put that to them. I also like to put similar questions to my students. And I'm often surprised at how much thought they've given to such things. I'm so much more likely to run across a 20 year old who has actually been chewing on those questions that you're just asking, so much more so than I did when I was in that age group. And I think some of it's because those questions are becoming much more urgent for this, Generation Z, I think they are. Yeah, what kind of life are they looking at? What are their job prospects? What kinds of professions are available to them that are going to help them with the crippling debt that they're accruing? But one of the things I try to encourage my students to consider, because they all have so much angst about what are they going to do after graduation, is to consider jobs outside of food service, please. Unless that's something that fills them up, you know, that's the caveat I give them is, look, if you feel like being a barista, or working as a waitstaff is something that you feel kind of energized about, absolutely. Go do that. If you feel like you can still come home and, in the evening or the weekends or your days off, you can still kind of manage some creative output, absolutely. Do that work. But I find that so many of them are just drained after doing those kinds of jobs that they don't have any room left to give to creative work. So think about things like being a firefighter. They often have rotating 24 hour schedules. You can be working two shifts on for two full days, and then three days off, and then two days on, and then three days off. That supports a studio practice. And then you're learning about this whole other sector of the world. Or what about working on an oil rig? What fuel for your creative practice that could be. Don't discount trades, either. That could be a really great way to find some harmony in your lifestyle, by working physically and learning about this sector that we've, like you're saying, so often thought is not for us. And, you know, now that I have a child, too, I think about, what am I going to encourage that child to do? There almost seems something really practical and healthy about a field of work that isn't so ballbusting, I guess, as what I've entered into, yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  Gosh, there's so much in there, because one of the things that I think about is how sometimes, when Tim and I are feeling particularly disillusioned with the world of the arts, one of the things that he'll say is, 'Fuck, if I want to go support the arts, I'm going to go be a plumber, and I'm going to go buy art from contemporary artists. And maybe set up a foundation.' Because being another cog in a system that is reliant upon people who will work very hard for not much money because we should feel privileged to be working in it at all is just being complacent with the problem.

Ericka Walker  Yes. That's another interesting, kind of sad quandary I find myself in sometimes is, as funding for the arts dwindles in either the US or Canada - and I do find myself kind of operating in both places in this sort of awkward in between way - but anyways, as some of that support may dwindle, what are we reliant on to sort of keep that going? And capitalism is a real drag that way. And a lot of people, who make prints especially, find themselves floating around in precarious work in academia, there's fewer and fewer tenure track jobs, and even within those tenure track jobs, the capacity for an institution to support that person as a working artist who's exhibiting and making, who needs to ship, needs to get materials out there, needs to have that support to keep it going... and let's talk about time as a resource, too. These people are so often so beleaguered with different responsibilities that broach so far outside their own research and creative practice and the teaching that it's hard to find time to make. But anyway, as that reality sort of looms over so many of us, yeah, what is keeping us afloat? If it's the commercial world, and if it's selling in galleries, then we need to, as you know, we need to keep courting people who are collecting - like these plumbers. Printmaking has more in store for them than enormous $30,000 canvases. I think that's where we're missing our audience sometimes.

Miranda Metcalf  You're so speaking my language, it's something that I think about so often that is tied into the over-intellectualization of art and the over-theoreticalization of art that creates this sense, in that same way, how we may be told and we may carry a bias within us that physical labor is not for me. Having been someone who's sort of a public interface with the arts for 10 or so years now, I get that the other way, where you'll see people who say, 'Oh, this isn't for me. This isn't my space, this isn't how I'm supposed to spend my money.' And it's a huge shame, because one of the things I would tell people is, 'You don't need to know anything about art, you just need to know if you like something or not. That is knowing about art.'

Ericka Walker  Absolutely. I want to share similar stories, which I think really drive my studio practice and what I'm still choosing to make images about. There were a couple instances, somewhere around 2010 and beyond, where my work was in an exhibition somewhere, and I was present at the reception, and somebody came up to me and recognized one of the aircrafts in this image and said, 'You know, that's the B-27 Bomber, my father was the lead engineer on that project. He looked at those as his baby. It was his life's work.' And his person really kind of glowed with this nostalgia and this pride about their father. And there were a couple other really similar occurrences where it was... a student's parent who was a farmer, their eyes lit up about some of the tractors I had been using in my work. I realized I really wanted to talk to that person, and I really valued their input about the work and how they read it. And I really started realizing, 'Oh, yeah, I'm often missing my target audience if my work is only in these types of galleries, or if I'm kind of sequestered in academia too much.' And that's led to a couple different potential roads for me that I'd really like to keep hammering away at. And one is looking for kind of alternative venues for my work, different types of museums, not necessarily art museums, but different, you know, military museums or murals on barns. And that's a whole other big topic that might take me away from the print conversation, but murals are definitely the other democratic medium, perhaps much more so. But in a nutshell, the desire to make murals in rural areas is getting at something very similar. I wanted to bring my work to the people that I'm interested in understanding and reconnecting with. I grew up in a very rural area, and my father grew up farming and was our local agriculture teacher. And I feel like what happens in rural areas is really important. And those are my people. I think I have a responsibility to continue to engage with them. I'm not in some elevated position above them. I don't see that at all. I think we have a lot to learn from one another.

Miranda Metcalf  I feel like I always do this in interviews, where I realize I get so far into it - and I'm so familiar with what your work looks like - maybe before we kind of dive into my next question, if you wanted to speak to the actual content of it, because I think it'll help put larger conversations in a good perspective.

Ericka Walker  Oh, sure. I think that the current artists talk that I give when I'm a visiting speaker somewhere is, it sounds very... it's a bit dry, and maybe academic`, but I'm interested in, through the images that I make, through invoking, through emulation, the visual, textual, and ideological language of 20th century Western propaganda. And I do that in service of exploring generative and disruptive birthrights and questioning the difficulty and complexity of honoring ideas of heritage, patriotism, progress. Yeah, that's sort of my best synopsis of what it is that I do. So a lot of my work, a lot of my print work, looks like European or American propaganda posters.

Miranda Metcalf  And that actually fits in perfectly with where I wanted to talk next, because one of the things that I really admire about your work is that it lives in this in between space where it captures these two opposing emotional realities of being proud of the American roots of the worker and the fighter, but also understanding that problematic side of blind nostalgia. And you don't gloss over these huge issues of colonialism and nationalism that, of course, are the other side of that coin, that's that classic image of a strong white man with blond hair standing in front of a tractor that he built, that he's conquering this land and bending it to his will, and making it produce food for his family and this kind of thing. And I find that really present in your work, and handled in this great way that it feels kind of agendaless. And like you're not necessarily trying to solve it, you're just presenting it in its complexity as a question for the viewer to answer. And I'm wondering if it's something that you yourself have done a bit of sort of soul searching to reconcile, particularly with your farming Wisconsin background?

Ericka Walker  Yeah, I think you very succinctly just underlined the driving question in my studio practice, or the driving kind of narrative. And that work - this work, I guess, because I think I'm still doing it - was really driven from that tension and that conflict of, like you said, sort of honoring where I come from, or implying that there's a lot to honor and be proud of. I have a very kind of white bred, middle class heritage, and a lot of the story of how my family came to be where they are, and came to find themselves in professions that they found themselves in, is a really lovely story that's easy to be proud of. But also, as you were saying, that is just couched in so many problematic narratives and realities that had to occur in order for me to have that pastoral, beautiful, heritage rich, patriotic upbringing. And yeah, so I found that was really hard to wrestle with, I didn't really know what to do with that. And so I started making this work. And I think that's a really important thing that I try to communicate to my students, and to remind myself of regularly, too, is as an artist, I don't think it's always appropriate to be really knowledgeable and wise about a worldview and then to just sort of take that worldview and put it directly into your art. That's not what I'm striving to do when I make. I'm interested in bringing problems and questions, and the way that I make work is an attempt to spend some time with those questions and to develop an intimate understanding of, how did I come to be this way? Who else has been steeped in this world? What are the implications of that? What does this look like? What's the rhetoric that has driven this? And I began, especially the print work, the lithographs that look like propaganda posters, I began that work with this question, can I honor and criticize at the same time? Is there something honorable, particularly, about warmaking? And where is that? Where is that honor? Is there anything to be proud of in that history? And I feel like I'm on the cusp of the answer to that for myself, not for anyone else, necessarily. Though I'd love it if people would look at my work and go there, but let's not get carried away. Anyway, to get back to more of the root of your question, I think that tension is a really cool place to make work from, no matter what the tension is. Like the tension between binaries, or even more than two opposing sides of an issue. You know, if a maker has things that they feel conflicted about, I think that's a really rich place to make work from. And there I remain, you know, conflicted and a little confused. And that's okay. Because it's producing work that I'm still excited about.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and I think it's what makes your work so intriguing, among other things, and the fact that they're just beautiful, and you're an incredible draftsperson, and it has these formal elements that of course, draw me in very strongly. But it's so much more interesting to see something that's saying, 'How about this?' As opposed to, 'This is it.' And that maybe makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable when I look at it, because I don't know how I feel. I think that's really a nice place to be.

Ericka Walker  Oh, I'm glad you think so. Because I think that's a hard place for people to be. I think that when people that don't have the kind of training that we have encounter something that doesn't have the kind of narrative they may expect, or it's hard to find meaning in, there's this assumption perhaps that, you know, the plumber that we were talking about assumes that he doesn't have the appropriate level of education or training, and that really bums me out. And that was something that I encounter, again, sometimes if I'm in a gallery space and I'm showing in a place where people who do have more blue collar backgrounds are actually attending, those are sometimes the questions I get, like, 'Well, I feel really dumb asking this, but what does this mean?' It happened a lot while I was on a dingli boom making this mural. People would drive by and they'd stop, and they'd say, 'Hey, I'm really excited about it. It's really beautiful. It's coming along nicely. But now that you have the text up there, I'm wondering, I don't get it, what does it mean?' And it was on site. It was a really great opportunity to explain, 'Oh, yeah, that's a common question. And let me tell you, as a contemporary artist, we're not - a lot of us, at least - aren't trying to present you with something that has one meaning that you're supposed to understand, or that if you spend enough time looking at it the right way, that you're going to get it. There's no it. These are some of the questions I wrestle with...' And I'll tell them a little bit about why this particular tractor, or why this piece of technology, where the text comes from, and this is maybe the kind of question I bring to it. But for you, it could be something totally different. And that really opened people up to kind of trying it out on their own and making meaning. And I want that to happen more. And that is another big huge topic.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, for round two. And something that I found in my time, again, being this kind of public interface and an art communicator is, if we can be so simplistic to talk about America, and really more specifically white America, in this way of there's a binary of the intelligentsia and the blue collar worker, and that people who might be from a more labor side of things might feel like they're being attacked a bit. Because this narrative that we're kind of fed is, if you're a laborer, you're someone who doesn't like me, because I'm smart and I'm queer, and you hate both those things. You know, that kind of thing. And then vice versa, where it's like, if you're an art professor, you just think I'm a dumbass hick, and you're making fun of me. And of course, the big overarching irony is that kind of "divide the masses so they bicker amongst each other and don't pay attention to the structural systems that are in place that are actually making our lives shit" is classic, of course. So that brings me back to this idea of, I could see maybe in some of your work, perhaps when you do get a little bit critical, I'm wondering if you ever get any kind of reactionary reception from it where it's, 'What, are you saying war is bad? Are you saying my grandfather died for nothing?' Which is understandable, as you said. Particularly when we are fed an "us versus them" narrative. 

Ericka Walker  Right, right. Yeah, I think that I spend maybe a bit of my energy making sure that when I show up somewhere, or when I am being recorded, or being written about, or if I'm doing the writing, or if my work or information about my work is going into the public, or if I'm there in public with my work, I try to stay accessible. Is that what I want to say? I am not... I've never really felt a part of the intelligentsia, and I very much am who I was growing up, in a lot of ways. And I may be sure to present myself and introduce myself in a way that is not off putting. I cuss a lot. And I don't put that on. I just make sure that I'm not censoring myself, or if a little bit of my Wisconsin accent comes out, that's all right. If our conversation starts off by talking about different kinds of front end loaders, that's good. Like, I'm not pasting it on or or pretending I'm something I'm not. I'm just sort of getting back into and remembering that yeah, I'm a little bit country. Of course, so much of the binary opposition that we have right now, so much of this polarity, in the US especially - and I know it's happening everywhere, I'd like to see that start to change. And that's a big wicked problem. - But one of the things I think I can do on my end is to continue to make work and to try to engage with that audience. I mentioned earlier the folks from places like Hartford, Wisconsin, where I grew up, who are working in manufacturing and farming and don't think that they can relate to me. They can, and I can relate to them. And we ought to share some of the same concerns. Maybe we don't. But if I can bring my work to them, maybe out of 50 people I talk to, I might only make an impression on one, or at least... not even make an impression, but give them a question to chew on. And maybe that question won't surface for a couple more years. But sometimes that's as lofty as my goals are as an artist.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, well, I think it is important work. And that there's a certain bravery in an image making where you're comfortable with letting an ambiguity hang as well. And that, again, as we were sort of saying, makes for quite interesting work. And maybe even more accessible in the sense that when there is that ambiguity, people from many different backgrounds can bring their own story to it a bit easier, and there could be less of a 'This isn't for me,' because that ambiguity lets that audience be a little bit broader.

Ericka Walker  I hope that, in that ambiguity, people can maybe locate themselves. Or if someone thinks like, 'Oh, maybe I'm part of the problem,' or 'Maybe I'm part of the solution.' Maybe there's room for both thoughts to occur, feelings, states of mind, simultaneously. And that's something I think we need to do a better job of as humans, to hold opposing truths, to not pick a camp, not pick a side, but kind of just be uncomfortable not knowing the answers and not knowing what's right. It's important. One other little nugget that occurred to me, there was a visiting artist who did a studio visit with me when I was in graduate school. It's a person whose work I very much admire, and his career is one I still look up to, and this person told me, 'You need to figure out what you're saying.' I don't know if this person really believed in their whole heart that I needed to find what it was I wanted to say socially, politically, et cetera. But I really was kind of upset by that and had to chew on it for a little bit. And maybe a year or so later, I was like, 'No. No, I don't, actually. That's what this work is about, is trying to explore that and trying to reveal for viewers the complexity of some of these topics that I'm playing around with.

Miranda Metcalf  One of the other things I really wanted to ask you about, which ties in nicely with this, is when you add text to your work it never feels like it's suddenly become didactic or heavy handed. And I'd love to hear you speak a bit to that process of finding the text and how you go about incorporating it in a way that it can still leave questions hanging at the same time that it's giving you more information.

Ericka Walker  I'm glad you asked that. It's a fun one to think about and talk about. And it's always evolving for me too. The text is such a fun, and often frustrating, but really kind of a wildcard part of my work that I still don't fully know how to articulate why some work so well and why others... or why I choose to use the bits and pieces that I do. So what I do, often, when I begin a piece of work, sometimes I'll start a piece of work inspired by the story of a particular invention or machine or conflict. Sometimes a piece will be inspired actually by a piece of text, and in that case, I know, like, 'Okay, I'm going to use text from these treaties, or this treaty, or this law. And that's going to be the basis of my work.' And then I kind of move out from there. But sometimes, like I said, I have an image or a piece of technology, or a figure from antiquity or from popular culture, and I have to find the text. At the beginning I didn't... So when I started this work in like 2009, when I started working with image and text, I didn't have a sort of library of go-tos. And I'm always expanding that library currently. But I started off by looking at existing propaganda posters, and then that sort of expanded into historical speeches. So Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address as a president to the nation still really piques my interest. It was very pointed, and actually a lot of outgoing policymakers, particularly presidents, if they're giving an address, it is often so much more, almost refreshingly, honest than any of their campaign speeches. They often involve warnings about where we're kind of going wrong, what some of the risks are that are perhaps coming with the next candidate, the next president. Some of the text comes from the 9/11 Commission Report, or recruitment language used by the Canadian Armed Forces or the American Armed Forces, recruitment language from, say, the 19th century, and then recruitment language from the 21st century. And sometimes it's coming from the Constitution of the United States. Sometimes it's coming from the Montreal Annexation Manifesto. But I recently read a very large chunk of the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War, that was rough. What I'm doing is I'm reading through these documents, and I'm finding these chunks of text that I don't know how to tell you why they're right or what it is about them that... I mean, clearly, their ambiguity is important to me. I think maybe I read them and I see, 'Oh, this could be read this way, or understood this way, or this way.' I betcha that's what I'm doing. I'm locating things that sound just poetic, or just rhetorical enough, that they have that spice to them, but that they can also be read in multiple ways. I think that must be what I'm doing. And then I isolate those, I put them in a file. And then often, sometimes I'll have too many, I'll have 20 phrases for one piece. And so I actually, instead of looking at them on my computer, I found that if I print them out and cut them up into little things, and I can play around with them as objects, that somehow gets me to the right place. And then what I've taken to doing lately too is having a lot of fun with finding something contemporary, and then finding something historic, and kind of mashing them together. Which to me is, even though the viewer would never know that those are two different eras of rhetoric being smashed together, I know it and I know that it kind of proves my point that political rhetoric especially has not changed very much. Some of the devices may be different, some of the tonality is different. But the basic propagandistic function of those words, and often those images, is still trying to do the same thing to us. It's really fun. It's kind of nerdy. It's also my permission slip, or my... I don't know how to phrase it. But I feel like I missed a lot of US history, world history. And I'm trying to kind of make up for lost time with Canadian history. And this is my sort of window to that. When I make work, I do my best to be as knowledgeable and intimately aware of the stories and the people and the technology that's being used. So each piece that I make, there's often quite a bit of research behind it.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, the one that I was particularly thinking of is a mural that you've done, I think, on the side of a barn or side of a rural building. I feel like it's important to get the phrasing just right, but it's something about like, 'Be industrious that you may live.' That particular one struck me, because it feels sinister at the same time as it feels hopeful.

Ericka Walker  I'm really pleased about that little chunk of text. So sometimes when I'm sifting through all of these different documents and phrases that I want to pull from for a piece, I'm often left with 20, or in some cases even more, different phrases that have to go in one image. And that really creates a problem for me, I hate weighing things down. But that one, that's all I had. That little chunk of text. I did weeks of digging into archives from Kings County, Nova Scotia. Kings County in Nova Scotia is is sort of the agricultural epicenter of the province. There's a lot of really rich soil and a really hospitable climate for growing food. So all the farms are there. And that piece, that mural that you're referring to, is there as well. And after all this digging, I had narrowed down a few things. There were a few local authors that I was pulling from, but it was really in this... I almost missed it. It was a transcript of a speech being given by the president of the agricultural society back in, I think, mid 19th century. It was quite old. And he was talking about the motto of the agricultural society, in its early days, was "Be industrious, that you may live." And so that would have, in those early days, I think would have been even earlier in the 19th century, as the New England planters sort of pushed out all the French Acadian farmers. Anyway, so "Be industrious that you may live," I have some of the same questions that you do. As a motto for an agricultural society, what was that espousing? Like, what...? First of all, let's go back to that era - only in that realm - but let's go back to that, when people were a bit more philosophical and poetic in their cultural societies, where I think that one really makes you think. In that era, I suppose, though, it was probably so that our communities may have a chance of making it through the winter, we need to be industrious. But farmers, growers, the ag industry, still need to do this. And consumers need to get on board too. So soil conservation, for one - climate change and soil conservation obviously are going hand in hand - really important issues that affect how we feed ourselves, and hence our survival. We need to figure out ways of doing farming a little bit differently so that we can continue to have viable food that we eat, to put it in a real nutshell. It's also, I've heard people in the area where I made this mural talk of it as kind of hopeful. And in terms that you were mentioning earlier, almost paying homage to the farmers in that area and elsewhere who, through their hard work and industriousness, are providing us with what we need. And I guess whose very resilience is something to be looked at with admiration and respect. 

Miranda Metcalf  I want to maybe pivot a little bit away from the intellectual world to talk a little bit more about actual physical labor and physical making, because something that I think is interesting about your practice and what you've been working on recently in this portfolio with NSCAD is that you have a background in fine art lithography. And yet, for this portfolio, you worked with a master printer, our friend Jill Graham. And I think often we think about, 'Oh, it's a master printer. They're working with someone who's not a printmaker, so they need someone to hold their hand through this.' And even though you make absolutely stunning lithographs, you've spoken to the fact that when you worked with Jill, she was able to show you some things that you'd wanted to do, but didn't have the skill set of at the time. And so you were trained in Fine Art at UT Knoxville, Jill is a Tamarind trained printer, and I think I'd be just kind of curious to hear you talk to, what should a young lithographer do? How do they know if they want to go get that technical training or the fine art training and your experience kind of dipping a toe in both sides of that world?

Ericka Walker  So everything that you touched on is so interesting to me. Yeah, the project with Jill was wild, and at the same time, I was also working on a piece that I finished with Jack Lemon and Steve Campbell down at Landfall. And I had, in a few circumstances, worked with people who printed my work before, but not really in that capacity where these were master printers who had it handled, like 100%. Not only just had it handled, but had the abilities, these really, I think they're very mystical abilities, to dream big and let them take care of the technical side of things. What a really wacky and sometimes awkward experience as somebody who makes prints themselves. There's a reason it's often not done that way. I think that my technical knowledge could really get in the way. I did my best in both cases, with Jill Graham and hopefully with Jack and Steve, to sort of get out of the way and pretend I didn't know anything. That was challenging, especially with Jill, because we work in the same institution. But I don't think of myself as a lithographer. That feels important to say, because I don't have anywhere near the kind of in depth technical knowledge that Jill or Jack Lemon or Steve Campbell would have, anyone with Tamarind training or whose training comes from years of experience. I just don't have that, and I'm still a bit awkward with lithography. I do a lot of big colorful lithos, and people are always surprised when I say that, but I really kind of suck at litho.

Miranda Metcalf  I know, I'm making a suspicious face on the other microphone. Like, you don't know litho? Really?

Ericka Walker  No, no, if you put one of my prints down and you and Jill are standing over a table looking at it, and I wasn't there, and you said, 'Jill, tell me what's wrong with this print,' she would, I'm sure, have a field day. I think some of the mistakes I make or missteps I make are things that maybe only another lithographer would know. But you know, the more I work alongside someone like Jill or my other colleague, Mark Bovey, the more I realize I don't know. So I didn't know enough to get the job done, and I picked up little pieces as I go. So through working alongside Jill Graham, or Mark Bovey, and certainly in graduate school with Beauvais Lyons, I picked up a lot of great tidbits here and there, just to help me kind of get by or to slowly branch out into maybe more adventurous technical problems within lithography. But yeah, I just feel like there's still so much to learn. And so I have a long ways to go. There's been so many things that I have wanted to try in lithography. And I think this touches on the last part of your question, which is, what kind of advice would I give? I think about my journey thus far, and making images and making prints. I was in an undergraduate environment where I think a lot of my students end up, which is where I'm just understanding printmaking enough by the time I'm about to graduate that I can make some half decent images. And then there is, for me, graduate school a number of years later, it was challenging to fit in technical training in that - and I had a three year program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I still found it difficult to hone things to the degree I wanted to. So I guess that's a word of maybe warning, or at least a truism, for those who are attempting to really hone technical skills and study under a master so that they may become a proficient etcher or lithographer. Like, maybe. You may have to really protect that and encourage that between the relationship that you have with your faculty, if that's even possible. But if that's really one's aim, I would say to see if you can work alongside a master printer, or go to a place like Tamarind and get that training maybe even prior to graduate school or after graduate school or, you know, graduate school is also not a necessity. So I feel like I'm still learning. It sounds like such a trite truism, but... and especially when it comes to litho. Yeah. So the piece that I did with Jill, it was subtle textural shifts. I had been looking at a lot of World War One propaganda posters, and there were some really beautiful, and sometimes, I think, unintentional textures that were showing up in background flats, and I wanted to do that in a way that was as sort of essential and rich as what I was looking at. And that was just something that... I just didn't go there on my own. I think of myself as a bit of a machine when it comes to litho, like, 'Don't try anything fancy, just get in there and get the job done.' And so working with her was a real treat. And some things are hard to see in a digital image of that piece, but if you look closely, there's just some really beautiful stuff going on in the background flat. 

Miranda Metcalf  I think that speaks to something that we were talking about just a little bit before we started recording, just about that kind of nature of graduate school, and how generally speaking, you're not going to get a huge focus on the technical side of making, just because you do have a finite amount of time and the pressures to do so much more are there. To write the papers and do all of these other things. But I do like what you were saying, that if that's something that's important to you, it's not necessarily that you couldn't get it, but it's not gonna just come to you, you're gonna have to make sure that that is something that you chase.

Ericka Walker  and I think that's something I still feel - you know, fight is a strange word to choose, I guess - but I still feel like I do that. I fight hard for the time, in a way. It's very time consuming, like the way that I draw can be really arduous and it takes a long time. And this ties back to what we were talking about with physical labor as well. I think that there's a lot of value in laboring in the material world, and whether that's physically drawing on a film or on a stone or or making marks on an etching plate, or it's moving a lot of soil and moving rocks into place, I think there's something spiritual and/or emotionally, psychologically important about engaging in the physical world and engaging your body. And so I fight for that. And I fight for the time and I had to... I think I missed some other opportunities to hone other things in graduate school. And I think currently, because I'm fighting for that, I miss out on other things. But that's just the mathematics of life, I suppose. But I find it's worth fighting for. So graduate school, I think, can be also what you bring to the table, and it helps to really have goals in mind, maybe specific goals, and be willing to reevaluate those every couple of weeks.

Miranda Metcalf  Beautiful. Well, I think that that's a really lovely place to wrap up. Where can people know more about you, follow your work, maybe even purchase your work if you've got representation? Where can they do that?

Ericka Walker  Well, you can check out my website. There's a couple links on the website to other people and places that are relevant to my practice. That's erickawalker.com. Or you can follow me on Instagram, @ericka_louise_walker.

Miranda Metcalf  

Beautiful. I'll put links to all of that. Thank you so much for your time and attention. And I'm really looking forward to sharing this, and I do hope we can come on again because I feel like there's so much more we could dive into.

Ericka Walker  Thanks for having me on, Miranda. It's just really great to be included in your roster of awesome print professionals.

Miranda Metcalf  Thank you again, and have a good night!

Ericka Walker  Yeah, have a good morning, almost afternoon, I suppose.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again next week when my guest will be Martin Mazorra. We'll talk about Cannonball Press and their famous twenty dollar no holler business model, the love of letterpress, and keeping company with wild turkeys. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next week.