Ericka Lopez: touch

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Mexican-American artist Ericka Lopez has been part of the Tierra del Sol studios in Southern California since 2019. Born with limited vision and now completely blind, Lopez’s process of making is almost entirely informed by touch and her own personal memories of color. 

As part of the engagement with this exhibition, Lopez and the Institute for the Humanities Gallery invite viewers to gently touch the works on display. As visitors to the gallery become active participants, there is the opportunity for deeper human connection beyond surfaces … and the recognition and celebration of Lopez’s extraordinary breadth of view and creativity as a contemporary artist. 

Lopez’s hand-coiled ceramic vessels with their celestial glazes personify human embrace, the sensation of being hugged, of being held, captured in earth and clay. The artist builds them as if they are a part of her, patting them and listening to the subtle changes in sound as they begin to take shape. She acknowledges them like friends when leaving the art studio for the day.

Her mixed-media sculptures are new universes of her own. Lopez has learned to identify the color of her materials through scent and feel. She stitches together threads, buttons, notions, beads, bobbles, pins, fabric scraps, keys, rubber coils, and so on, building far-off places Lopez imagines beyond imposed barriers and limits. Her deceptively simple punch needle abstracts transform before us into vivid terrains, brightly hued vistas, and seas of yarn.

Ericka Lopez finds joy, meaning, and purpose in everyday objects … in the unexpected way they feel in her hands, the combination of one to another, and their echoing of what the artist visualizes. Her innovative practice jolts the system, upending any preconceived notions we have of materials and methods, artists and galleries, and even why art and making matters. Who do we wish to be, in the mix of it, one to another? Can we possibly stitch together a new world closer to the one we imagined?

–Amanda Krugliak, IH Curator

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Born 1987 in Mexico, Ericka Lopez has been making art at Tierra del Sol Studios since 2019. Working across ceramic, fiber, and mixed media constructions, Lopez’s practice is centralized around her exploration of touch. Lopez was born with limited vision and is now completely blind. Lopez trained in massage therapy and previously volunteered at a soup kitchen when an encounter with Tierra’s ceramics studio shifted her trajectory toward fine art. Her masterful command of clay hand-building techniques enables Lopez to create intricate, dynamic, and organically structured coil vessels. Lopez’s works are informed by her finite recollection of color; she requests specific shades and combinations of glazes that generate spontaneous, distinctive surfaces when fired. This intuitive approach continues in her fiber wall works and mixed media sculptures. Utilizing punch rug embroidery, Lopez creates abstract fields of yarn and found objects, often repeatedly punching through the same area to yield densely layered sections. Lopez has learned to identify the color of her materials via scent and feel, a process that is difficult to put into words. Her mixed media sculptures are created almost entirely by touch, consisting of threads, buttons, beads, fabric scraps, and found objects instinctively stitched together using simple sewing techniques. Lopez hopes her works can be experienced through an inquiry of touch.

Ericka Lopez has exhibited her artwork at Laband Gallery and Tierra del Sol Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Lopez’s debut solo exhibition, “Continuous Touch,” was curated by jill moniz for Tierra del Sol Gallery in the Spring of 2023. She has had works acquired by notable private collections such as that of Beth DeWoody and by the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at UC Long Beach.