Erica Van Horn’s creative exercises

Abstract

ABSTRACT Erica Van Horn is an American artist and writer who has been living in Ireland since 1996, and runs Coracle Press with the poet Simon Cutts from their home in rural Tipperary. Van Horn’s work often takes as its starting point local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider, creating journal entries, books and ephemera that present a one-sided, coolly recorded, wryly humorous set of observations. This is the first study of the representation of Ireland in Van Horn’s work. The article draws on Claudia Kinmonth’s study of the resourcefulness of the rural Irish material economy. Van Horn’s work shares the “inventive and resourceful” qualities praised by Kinmonth, “making do” with the physical, visual, and verbal raw materials in her immediate environment. Following a comparative reading of Van Horn alongside the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons, who have both written books in rural Ireland from the perspective of the “blow-in,” this article proposes that Van Horn’s work is a form of “local looking” and “attending to what is close at hand,” qualities that have been called for by the writer Tim Dee as a means of fostering imaginative engagement with place at this time of climate crisis.