Embracing the cultural histories of glassmaking, cooking, and crafting, Erica Rosenfeld’s work celebrates community-centric, obsessive, labor-intensive ritual. Her hybrid artistic practice has centered on performative, sculptural, functional, and social aspects of glass and food-making. Vetri checked in with Erica to see how she’s adapting her making-process while working from her Brooklyn home. Here’s what she had to say:
Like everyone, “The Pause” has forced me to change course. In March I had been vigorously working on Spring jewelry orders (a lot of which got canceled) and preparing to leave for a month-long residency at the Studio at the Corning Museum (which got postponed). After a few minutes of disappointment about those and other lost opportunities, I quickly remembered how fortunate I am to live in a home that I feel safe in and comfortable enough to be locked up in for months and how so many people around the world don’t have those luxuries.
Although I was no longer able to materialize work that I had been waiting to make until I had the right resources to do so, I have a lot that I can work on at home. Rather than blowing and fusing glass for sculptures and jewelry, I’ve been painting, making collages, sketching out ideas, and cutting glass for things that I will fuse whenever I can return to Urban Glass to work again.
I have also been spending the quarantine making art, cooking, gardening, writing, talking to friends on Zoom, and working out for the first time since high school while watching President Cuomo in the mornings. I mastered the perfect crispy skin roasted chicken which gave me a lot of satisfaction one day when I hadn’t felt for weeks.
I think that sometimes someone’s most creative work is born when we have limited resources and the resources that we have had all along go unseen until there is a necessity to find them.
For all available works by Erica Rosenfeld, view here Artist Page here.