Erin Foley

Artist Bio

Erin Foley is an artist and educator who received her BFA in sculpture and sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Foley has exhibited nationally at group exhibitions and projects in Chicago, IL, Marfa, TX, Los Angeles, CA, and Omaha, NE. Recently she received a CAAP grant from Ceasefire to fund a program that will help teens build an educational garden in the Humbolt Park area of Chicago. Foley has been instructing K-12 students in large art classes with an emphasis in architecture and design for the past 3 years. Some of the large-scale projects include an inflatable theater, community garden plans and plans for redesigning the White House. Foley is also on the Board of Directors and Volunteers for the Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, an urban orchard scheduled to take root in 2011.

Artist Statement

When asked, sculture is the discipline I choose to identify with because it is defined by space and open to any medium. It has no limitations and offers a flexibility that suits the project-based practice I work within. My art practice is largely influenced by architecture in the built work and the many histories the structures have come to represent and signify.  I am intrigued by the decisions that are made during the realization of the structure and the many hands involved in the process.

Recent projects have produced altered model-like representations and interpretations of specific architectural structures. Bosphorus is a project where I created a 1:100 scale model of a collapsed representation of the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey. The collapsed representation of the bridge addresses the language of damage caused by violence in architecture and disconnect between East and West. The symmetry of the sides create a neutrality, calling attention to the separation of the two situations as a whole, rather than specific conflicts ending in broken relations. By doing so, the bridge creates a metaphor for the unanswered problems of conflict between two different vantage points.

I appreciate art works that evoke social change on any level and feel it is important to critically engage the viewer. Art can be a vehicle for people to have group dialogue or individual thoughts on a certain subject or idea. As an artist I hope to create work that creates an open platform for discussion of complex topics and reflection on the actions of history.

Educational Philosophy

As an artist and educator, I believe that aesthetics play a crucial in everyday life. The environment in which we live and interact directly affects our experiences in communities and educational environments. The way a city is planned, where an alley is placed on the grid or where a tree is planted in a lot has significant impact on everyday life. Community, both micro and macro, can be found at the core of my program curricula. I believe teaching students about art and the environment can help them obtain respect and awareness of the world they are in, and have a positive influence on decisions they make in their everyday lives.

Studying local and school communities, students gain an understanding of the history, planning, and decisions in their environments, allowing them to have an educated perception of situations in the built world. During my five-week Urban Gateways residency at Holmes Elementary School we thought of Chicago as our community and made a list of all of the problems in it. We then mapped out where the problems were and discussed possible solutions for them. Three-dimensional models of the solutions were made and placed on a large cardboard cutout of the city of Chicago. One student made a model of a bulletproof suit people could wear to protect them from gunshots. Another student made a robotic trash-eater that cleans up the trash in the city. Together the individual models created a community of solutions both practical and fantastic. The project as a whole created an open dialogue about the community we live in and allowed the students to collaborate on skill-building activities.

Model making is one of the many formats the disciplines of architecture and design utilize. Architectural drawing, landscape design, and construction of temporary structures have served as framworks for projects that students apply their ideas, understandings and intelligence toward. For example, in architectural drawing students not only learn how to create elevation, plan, section, and perspective drawings, but also they learn about proportion, scale, how space is divided, gain an understanding of the circulation of the building, and learn a format they can communicate their own ideas through. Teaching programs with themes of community, environment, and architecture provides flexibility for site-specific curricula that provoke problem-solving, critical thinking and reflective dialogue. In the classroom and beyond students are encouraged to become aware of the way our environment is built and to learn how to make their own observations and improvements in the world.