Touch

Ericka Lopez is a visual artist born in Mexico and living in Los Angeles. Lopez lost her sight at an early age and is mostly non-verbal. This exhibition of tactile assemblage works and gestural coiled pots were created by the artist through touch and texture, colored by memory. The works are sensory, physical, immediate, reaffirming, and deeply expressive. Viewers to this exhibition are invited to touch the work.

During her residency, the artist and her support team, which includes her mother and translator, will engage directly with students in the exhibition space, offering a transformative experience based on human expression and connection through art. Because Ericka feels most comfortable when she is working, she plans to make artwork with students as part of the class engagements with the exhibition.

About Ericka Lopez
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.