Suspension of a Necessary Habit: a conversation with Erin Hunt
12 October 2024By Micaela Dixon
I was first introduced to artist Erin Hunt by a colleague with whom I share a first name. By chance, Hunt and I share the nation’s capital as a hometown, right down to the suburb. We thought possibly streets apart when we first met in 2021. We also share a fondness for the same island community in Newfoundland, though Hunt has now been a permanent resident since summer 2012 and I only just about reached two years. In 2021, I moved to Fogo Island to work for Fogo Island Arts, a residency that welcomes artists most of the year. The residency program appeals to a sensibility that values an unconventional approach to seclusion. The island is small, but wider than you’d imagine––it accommodates a total of ten communities along its coast and boasts a population of about 2,250.
I encountered Erin’s work for the first time at her studio in the town of Fogo. My name twin and I set off to visit the studios and workshops of the island’s artists and makers under the guise of an exhibition concerning the forecast. Hunt had assembled paintings, drawings, and found objects over the walls of her studio. To me, Erin’s paintings were measured impressions that borrowed aspects of the landscape but arranged them through a unique spatial register rooted in form and colour.
Although Hunt’s painting practice doesn’t have much to do with islands as subjects or their geographies, her studio became a place I would often visit to talk about what it was like to live on an island. Hunt has maintained a full-time studio practice on Fogo Island since the early days of her arrival. First, she began painting out of a room in her house, then borrowed the studio of an artist named Bruce Pashak during the winter of 2015, and a year later, she set up her own studio space in the Courthouse of Fogo. I returned to her studio there in August 2024 to set up our exchange.
Our conversation began around Hunt’s work with flower essences but quickly shifted to the scope of her painting practice, its process, and subject matter. We also discussed the subtle body, model-making in order to help shape our understanding, the relationship between the nervous system and time, the difference between a body or a figure in painting, collecting discarded objects, a few books we were reading, and the meaning of what we call our “money mindsets.”
Micaela Dixon: Erin, you have two distinct practices. On the one hand, your artistic practice encompasses painting, drawing, and collecting, and on the other, you work with and study flower essences. Do you see them as quite distinct practices or do you find that they overlap?
Erin Hunt: When I first began working with flowers and making formulas, there was a desire to approach the process in the same way that I work with painting, so almost in a compositional way. I was wanting to connect different subtle properties, ecosystem relationships, or colour and form relationships with various combinations of flowers, and I was thinking of how they might relate to particular relationships in the subtle body. In my mind, it was almost musical, or like I could shape remedies in the way I might make a painting. A few years ago, I did a lot of work towards that end, which was perhaps a little foolhardy. At a certain point it became clear that if I wanted to work with others, I would need training from within the flower essence tradition. This exploration was something different. It was fruitful for me to start to think about what painting can be in this way, but I came to see that I have to keep the more exploratory work separate from what it means to work with plants and others in a healing capacity, for obvious reasons. My painting practice and my work with flower essences feed each other in subtle ways, through me taking the remedies, or studying the flowers, perhaps. And the painting has to stay in a free space.
MD: How did your interest in flower essences begin?
EH: I came to them initially because I was not finding answers within the current medical system for something that was going on with me and I was feeling very isolated in that experience. A series of coincidences and experiences in nature led to the discovery of this community. It’s a world that goes very deep. Something really opened up for me when I heard about this relationship between flowers and the subtle energetic forms of our thoughts and emotions. It was around that time, maybe four to five years ago, that I started experimenting with composition and these subtle body relationships without really knowing what I was doing. I didn’t fully understand the complexity of flowers as a form of medicine at that point. Meanwhile, I was taking the flower essences myself and started to have some awareness that my approach was maybe too one-directional, and that maybe there was some wisdom being communicated around listening and a more quiet form of exchange. From there my interest just grew into a deeper curiosity of that world, along with a desire to continue to learn from them in order to possibly work with others, which I now do. It’s been clarifying in understanding my approach to painting too.
MD: I am curious about why incorporating flower essences into painting, through gesture or composition, doesn’t work for you.
EH: Well I do still incorporate the flower essences or the memory of working with a flower occasionally, but I’m clearer now about the way they operate for me in the work. More as a way to shift my thinking in relation to the imagery I perceive emerging in a painting, or as something more playful. They’ve helped expand the way I think about what painting is. We’re often creating models—and if we talk about our understanding of science and space for example—we create models so that we can have a way to hold our understanding, the way you might hold an object in your hands to look at it from all sides. But they’re really inventions that temporarily suspend the understanding that we’re also interconnected with the thing we’re making a model of. We have to do the models in order to be able to see a reflection of some sort. I think of painting like that too. I am trying to parse that out now because, for quite a few years, I was involved with the flowers and it was getting to be too entangled and too close to me. The distinction between making paintings and being involved in healing work was getting blurred. I realized that this wasn’t productive for the work. I need to hold my understanding of the paintings in my hands as its own thing. That is where I can be very playful and take risks because of course it will touch on things that are close but at least there is some perspective.
MD: When did you start painting?
EH: I finished art school in the early 2000s and I had a studio in Ottawa for a number of years. At the time I was making quite large-scale work. I was also working part-time jobs but I was lucky that I had a studio space I could afford. When I decided to go back to school to study architecture, I didn’t really paint at all for the four years I was there. Lots of drawing and model making, but there wasn’t really an opportunity to continue painting. After I finished the program, I got a studio in London, UK and tried to work there. It was challenging though, negotiating office life was exhausting. The studio became a place to just sit and look at the wall.
MD: If you’re an artist with a studio practice, cities like London and Toronto have become nearly impossible. Certainly, people sell work here and there, but making a livelihood is very, very precarious.
EH: Definitely, moving to Fogo Island felt like a relief in that sense, like maybe I’d have the space again and the opportunity to get back to making work. Making the choice to stay and shape our lives here has been hugely generous in terms of time and space. It took a while to find the right balance on the island and wasn’t easy for a number of years while my kids were young, but I feel very fortunate that we’ve been able to stay and I can continue to work. Financially, it continues to be tough. It does feel like we have to continually make that choice.
MD: Some time ago, we were both talking about painting, or artworks, being informed by the places where they are made but not necessarily about those places. So life on an island, or life in any place, but how a work might reconcile some aspect of that place. I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on this. When I look at some of your works like Resort (2022) I recognize that there might be specific elements of the landscape that show up, like Brimstone Head in the town of Fogo, but I get the sense that it’s your own orientation of the map; your own reflections of a site onto a space of abstraction, or a space of colour and trying to create an understanding of those elements in synch.
EH: There is something about the process of painting for me where I need to see something in order to know what I want to see. So when sites like Brimstone Head show up in my work, it is almost a reflection of a form that I may have already been thinking about. I was thinking about the form of a gorilla’s head just before I moved to the island, back when my partner and I were living in New York. I have a photo that I brought with me, a National Geographic photo of a gorilla from behind. I still think about this image, so seeing this shape in the landscape was a reminder of that. This sort of thing can act as a primer to start to see more things in this way, like when I was reading The Little Prince to my daughter around then, I noticed the drawing of a snake that swallowed an elephant (that gets mistaken for a drawing of a hat) and that also looks like Brimstone Head. So there can be these triangulations of objects and things and images that stand out in my experiences. I’ll pull that out when I’m painting if I see those forms emerge again.
MD: To me, the shape of Brimstone Head looks so bodily. It’s amazing because every time you drive into the community of Fogo, it’s such a monument. It’s mostly from one vantage point, but it changes as you walk around. I see it as an arm or a shoulder. I also see what you mean by a gorilla’s head. It really strikes me as a meaty body.
EH: It totally is. Beefy!
MD: The variety of colour and sensation that you feel on the island seems to me closer to a pure sensation of the landscape, to the colours. Perhaps it’s to do with the scale that is smaller?
EH: Difference stands out more here because of the vastness of the natural surroundings for sure. There is something raw and true, and I don’t know what those words necessarily mean, but it’s a very immediate sense. It’s very fresh. I am thinking of the colours that I see. I get excited about unexpected combinations of colours. I spend a lot of time looking at colours in nature but those are almost too pure and too beautiful…there’s something about the minds that put brown next to two slightly different shades of bright orange…
MD: Like on the houses in town?
EH: Yes, on the houses or on knick-knacks. It’s very fresh. No one is thinking about being polite. It feels rather direct.
MD: It strikes me as a feature of openness. Somewhere where possibility is open even though the structures around living can be quite restrictive. There is one form of living but there are a lot of approaches that are exciting and inspiring.
EH: Exactly, like life hasn’t been drained out of it yet. There is a quality that feels completely alive.
MD: Have you ever read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation? There is a very early line in the introduction of the book that reads: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.”1 I understand it to mean: you start with the map before you are even at the space depicted on the map, that this way of thinking is our approach to our understanding of space and our experience, and how we navigate space starts with a map. Pure space as a reality is so wide that we make maps that give us a route.
EH: There’s a lot to say about this. It’s really at the heart of what I think about often. That pre-verbal way of seeing, freshly without the maps and wanting, in that same way we were talking about with the model. Wanting to see where that freshness takes itself in its own world. That pre-belief and pre-concept moment building its own structure from an immediate experience. But it involves seeing the maps themselves as if they are found objects seen in the same way that we might meet uncharted territory.
MD: It’s a radical way of thinking about curiosity, intuition or experience. Without convention, the quality of living can be a completely unlatched project. The motion that is structured and set is a way of facing what is otherwise often chaotic.
EH: You’re right, if I think about how it must be in infancy, that early unstructured state, things probably would appear chaotic or amorphous if we suddenly saw like that now. Do you know Martin Buber? He wrote a book titled I and Thou (1923), which is dense and some of the language is a bit dated, but there is a part of it that I think about often where he talks about the longing to relate as the primary impulse that begins the process of distinguishing between ‘I’ and ‘you.’ The longing itself is mysterious.
Similarly, I come back to this question of how we structure our sense of self in relation to the world because of my work with the flowers. I think about perception and the way our nervous system is involved in how we operate at a sensory level, and how our sense of time might be tied to that. I think time and the nervous system are inseparable and that the nervous system is much more vast than we think. It has a collective aspect that isn’t strictly physical or personal. I wonder too about how our experience of living, related through the senses and the nervous system, forms the psyche. How beliefs and structures take shape for ourselves…this is what I am thinking about often. The body is such a mystery.
However, I have recently been able to see, perhaps because I’m thinking of the subtle body, that in the paintings I make, the subject is close to something like space. For a long time I didn’t know because it isn’t a thing itself, but it dawned on me not too long ago. It’s this sense of space which is actually very full and is a construction in its own right coming out of relationships. But there’s a hidden quality to it similar to the way our interiority feels private.
MD: Would you go as far to call your paintings representations of spaces?
EH: I would say they are representations or just prior to representation. I want them to be a direct experience of something. Representation itself maybe. Or just a feeling. Even though the works are abstract and there are no figures, I still feel like I am talking about the body and the figure. It’s always almost something, and the sense of that being almost something. I don’t know what word to use: figure or body. It’s not really bodies that are emerging in the work, but a sense of being in a body perhaps while seeing something of substance. Seeing the space inside seeing maybe.
MD: But figure is a really interesting word for it. Even through this approach of representing a figure in space through colour or using colour to that end.
EH: I go in different directions with a lot of the paintings, and use many different languages. But I can see that there is this spatial component in the work tied to colour, which is common to painting in general I suppose, but knowing it is more of an interest or ‘subject’ for me, I’ve been able to see that it’s all contained within something larger, or more phenomenological. In the same way we might experience the body as a broader field of awareness that includes subtleties of thought and feeling.
There is also so much going on at the studio with the things that I collect. I work in a pretty fragmented way, and so over time there are some paintings that have been more worked than others. On top of that, it’s like I see differently every day, so it can feel like starting over and over. This way of working I think evolved out of necessity in relation to parenting and wanting to make disruptions workable in terms of negotiating attention and time. The continuity had to become about discontinuity or something. So I do wonder about the continuity of something like ‘voice.’ Maybe the way it emerges over time in a person’s work has something to do with meeting yourself in the freshest way possible in the work.
MD: And somehow less constricted. Less aware of the map.
EH: That is possibly where to find the unifying factor, if you can meet yourself in an uncharted space. It seems like it might be the best hope for the work too, to be able to meet the viewer in that way.
MD: I keep thinking about what you said about the nervous system and time.
EH: Thinking about this kind of stuff fascinates me. I enjoy reading different perspectives coming out of the world of physics. David Bohm’s writings have been interesting to me recently. He was a theoretical physicist who worked with Albert Einstein and he also published a series of dialogues with spiritual philosopher Krishnamurti later in his life. He writes a lot about order and creativity, and that the project of science came out of what was originally known as natural philosophy––part of an inquiry process related to the desire to find a common language to describe aspects of our experience of reality. I’m also re-reading The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2017). In the last few chapters he talks about the human experience of time, and perceptual processes related to the nervous system which are tied to memory and the way we form pictures of things in the world. He says in physics we know that what appears to us as mountains, tables, books, etc., are not actually entities at all, but processes that we organize into pictures because of the way we reflect the world, as processes ourselves.
Within this ordering process we only see a fraction of what gets registered from our experience in the nervous system in our conscious awareness. I think about how that process and how memories of an experience form in relation to emotion and story, that then get recorded in the body. This is why I love the world of studying flowers and their medicine because they address this aspect of digesting our experiences. What we don’t or can’t digest consciously appears to go into a hidden realm of latency, to be processed later in time and space. The process of digestion and assimilation is so much about feeling balanced and safe and well. Everything gets processed at some point, in some form I think, whether we can see it or not. Sometimes that’s through sleep, sometimes it’s through our offspring.
MD: There was a quote from poet Mary Karr that I read on Instagram the other day. It was about the differences between a prose writer and a poet. It said the poet is in love with the world and the prose writer is trying to create an alternate world. I thought it was a nice way of thinking about poetry or an aspect of literary writing.
EH: I love that way of thinking about poetry. What you can add to that is Lynda Barry. I’m paraphrasing here, but she has said something like: artists make their work not because they want to escape the world, but because they want to stay. She might have been speaking about invention within the comic world, but it’s this vital thing, completely connected to being here. That statement about the poet and the prose writer makes me think of painting too. There is this aspect of both being in love with the world but also wanting to see what you can see or what you can discover that you haven’t seen.
MD: I think about it also as being in love with the world or being disappointed by the world. It’s a negotiation of emotion. Being angry, being upset, being in love, being sad, being neutral, being depressed. Do you know what I mean?
EH: Just making contact!
MD: Yes but also being in it and having a desire to stay and be in love with it despite the disappointments. To interface, and to put some of those experiences into a form, and have that form be in the world in its own way which I see as a relief from this process, this emotional nervous system process.
EH: Digesting. So we can be here.
MD: Exactly. With regards to your experience of the model or of the thing, and beginning a painting. How do you start a painting? Is there ever a time where you have just blank canvases on the wall of your studio?
EH: Not usually all blank. I’ll start maybe one or two when I hit a wall with a group of paintings. When certain works are getting overworked or I can’t figure out what to do, then I feel that I need something fresh. A lot of times, I start with a vague sense of something I want to try. Usually it’s colour related or it’s a particular form that maybe came up in a drawing or sometimes appears when I’m just about to drift off to sleep. I almost see what I want to paint and then it disappears and then there’s a desire to try to find it.
I collect these objects that are pieces of garbage that I find everywhere on the island too, usually washed up on the shore, and I will make tracings of them, cut out silhouettes and then I’ll do rubbings of these object shapes on paper.
MD: Do you see these drawings and rubbings as studies or do you see them as works in their own right?
EH: The ones I showed at the Bonavista Biennale last year I made as finished drawings. The ones in the studio now are on lined looseleaf. I see them as generative. It can be a way to start a painting and have something to build upon as a basic structure. As soon as I start to paint though, things change.
MD: It gives you a sort of template?
EH: Yes, a template for what can happen. And sometimes it turns into something completely different and the template disappears all together.
MD: The discarded objects that you collect are almost structural components.
EH: They can be almost like an architectural drawing.
MD: Like an infrastructure?
EH: Yes, even a single object I think of like that. I usually like objects where it isn’t immediately clear what they are.
MD: It’s interesting in relation to orienting or reorienting the object, compared to its original use. Now, we are looking at the pedal of a bicycle, but when you stand it up right its not immediately clear.
EH: When it’s out of context, or viewed in elevation or plan it has its own world. So in a way, I want to give space back. These objects generate something that is at first flat, in the form of silhouettes, and then I use them to try to build space from. I will play with the positive and negative space when I go back in with others layers.
MD: So, these forms are always then coming in and out of the background or of the foreground?
EH: Yes, much more so than a kind of layout of a plan for a painting. Composition tends to happen more like that in my work, spatially and over time.
MD: That makes sense to me because your paintings don’t start with reconstituting imagery of, for example, the harbour of Fogo. I was thinking this morning about Silke Otto Knapp’s landscape paintings. Those works are rather figurative landscapes that are really of Fogo Island.
EH: Silke saw Round Head and other places here in her own way and likely developed a way of working that was coming from the particular way she saw things. I’m not sure, but maybe we find our methods or even subjects through particular ways of seeing and processing relationships.
MD: This experience of, as you say, having a raw look at things and that things are not so structured together so perfectly is an interesting way to think about generating a figure, or a body or a relation to colour too.
EH: Especially when it’s abstract work. It’s been a challenge for me to find a way to communicate straightforwardly about each painting. It is easier to talk about what I do and how they feed each other rather than telling a story about each one. Because it’s not direct like that. Everything is quite indirect in the way that I work.
MD: That is a quality that I really like about your work.
EH: Thank you. I’m interested in playing with the line before meaning, or before belief. That pre-verbal state where it’s almost a name, it’s almost a form. Just like that formation process of our structures and our objects that we have in our minds that can solidify. So I like to play with that line right before, where you sense it is almost approaching something. I also try to offer a way into the paintings with the titles of the works.
MD: I was going to ask you about the titles actually.
EH: That’s one of my favourite parts of the process. I see titles in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, I see them as another component of the painting, like a spatial component. Almost the way that a word has a ‘feeling sense.’ Like in Sanskrit, the word is supposed to be an actual energetic form that represents the thing itself. Its form relates to an energetic one. Some titles come from a butting up of the literal and the figurative, so that the painting can possibly orient in two directions.
MD: One of the titles of your work in the current exhibition Three Fogo Island Painters at JK Contemporary here on Fogo Island, that I loved the most was Money Mindset (2024).
EH: The words I choose already have pictures and feelings associated with them. Like the word sofa could be a memory of a particular sofa or whatever the image that pops up with that word. So each individual can have a personal reference that they are then looking at the painting with. And because the painting will be a little bit of an incongruity in terms of imagery I feel like it can serve two purposes. It gives viewers a degree of security through the recognition of a common word or phrase, but because it’s an incongruity in relation to imagery, it can also be a tool for seeing something in a fresh way.
MD: Almost like a clue?
EH: Well, the titles can be disruptors or other times they will have a resonance with the visual. Something will have a quality like ‘sofa’ even if it’s not an image of a sofa for example.
MD: Similar to a sensation of comfort?
EH: Sure, whatever that particular thing evokes, it’s usually tied to some other memory. Other times the duration of the painting process determines one or two titles for a work. A painting might go through a particular transformation from one thing to another and during that time I might be listening to certain songs or looking at certain things so those elements become embedded in the work and their name emerges from those relationships.
MD: It’s interesting to see how it ends up playing out in the longer term formation of the work. Another title that particularly struck me was Suspension of a Necessary Habit.
EH: This past winter I was working a lot with rectangles and squares. The title for that one was taken from a Cortazar short story. I’m not sure how to speak about that painting in particular yet. The works have to sit for a long time and then I revisit them later. If they solidify conceptually too quickly for me it doesn’t feel right.
MD: For it to be so crystallized?
EH: Exactly. I need that separation and then I can see in a more detached way. It helps me to see it differently. I do take my time too, and I make little moves mostly on lots of different works. I very rarely work in a very direct way––start to finish. I prefer that they go through some kind of transformation that’s different from the way they begin, but it’s hard to do that with continuous attention.
MD: How would you describe your paintings to people on Fogo Island?
EH: I might speak about them in terms of the way colour and shape relate to the feeling nature of experience and that I’m interested in the way we come to know things. Also something about the fact that they are shaped out of elements from my life.
MD: Or rectangles and squares which is a negotiation of form, colour, and sensation. Not just to do with the narrative of the story in an artwork.
EH: In the past I’ve named all the elements that have informed a painting, like particular objects or events, but this can confuse and distract people I think. I’m still not sure what to say about any individual painting truthfully. I often can’t name a tangible subject. And it doesn’t feel right to pin it down with a particular story. It has made talking or writing about it hard.
MD: I like this sensibility of arriving towards something concrete but restraining from fulfilling its representation.
EH: It’s a quality that I appreciate in other people’s work too. I do that because it is what generates the most interesting work for me. But it might also have something to do with wanting to trust that a more open, perhaps even fragmented way of working can generate something that feels precise. That it can be a reflection of something real.
David Bohm talks about how we are fragmented and our systems are fragmented and that is how we are looking in a relationship through these fragmented aspects, without remembering that it is actually all one thing. We go down these paths of tension and conflict in order to grow something probably. The way a plant butts up against rocks and forms in a certain way. I see it as part of nature.
This comes back to the title of Money Mindset actually. For a while it was one of these paintings that I couldn’t figure out and the form and structure related to one of the collages that I have in the studio. While I was in the midst of struggling with the painting, I came across a self-help ad for dealing with your ‘money mindset.’ In it a woman talks about our inherited money blocks and how it is really about our energy system and healing these things that we inherit from our families, and from societal relationships. She was essentially selling a way to shift your “money mindset,” which is funny. I ended up listening to someone else around that time whose perspective was that money is just another aspect of nature. Which of course, it is. In the first place, it was literally nature that was being exchanged as a type of currency––land and plants––and now it’s taken these more hidden forms that are abstracted and amorphous and analogous to power structures. But it does come from nature in the same way we come from nature. We have shaped it into those other forms. So in terms of “money mindset,” I think this woman was saying, “if it’s nature, if money is nature, then why is it so socially taboo?” I liked the title because of its slightly uncomfortable reference to the self-help world or a relationship to speaking about money. The imagery in the painting is quite soft. My money mindset is no less troubled after making the painting. It’s tricky, I mean the truth is, painting is a thing in the world I have chosen to contend with that takes up real estate and time that I have to somehow pay for. If money is another aspect of our well being, in the form of nourishment, or a flow of exchange connected to a regulated nervous system, then it raises all kinds of questions about where things stand both personally and systemically.
MD: Indeed, I’ve had a similar kind of thought pattern around this. The feeling of money, or the control around money has a violent quality. But on the other hand, there is an awareness of how necessary money is to basic subsistence. There’s no roof over the head without money, no food on the table without money, no gas in the car without money. It’s necessary to life and to living and there are also systems of solidarity relating to the widespread lack of money.
EH: This is another thing Bohm talks about. The way nature and what he has observed in physics goes from simplicity to more complexity and that we are capable of imagining great complexity and of making pictures of great complexity. I think we often forget about our direct experience. We tend to react to injustices based on pictures rather than what is in front of us. Or we construct things based on preformed ideas.
MD: It seems to me that it can be easier to focus on images of injustices rather than reflect or process things that are right in front of us.
EH: True. And they are part of the same thing. They are emerging from us based on things we might have already agreed on so it’s not a matter of ignoring what’s going on but there is a subtle relationship there. The pictures coexist with our direct experience. We’re evolving inside these pictures or maps in a sense while also looking at them as discrete things. The awareness that that’s maybe the way I’m working too has been important for me to see.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994),1.
Feature Image: Brimstone Head, taken in the town of Fogo, 2024. Photo by Erin Hunt.