Erin McCluskey Wheeler

I think a lot about collaboration. There is a practice in poetry where a writer takes a line from another poet as a starting place and then shapes it into their own poem. The first writer is always credited at the beginning of the printed poem in italics, like the words themselves are leaning into the sharing. I have always loved these poems. It feels generous and open: here is who I am reading and influenced by and also, these words have led me somewhere new. My visual artwork often contains other artists’ painted papers given to me in trades and gifts. I ask artists to send me their experiments and failures, their orphans and leftovers from their studios.  I connect these pieces together, sometimes working with as many as fifteen different artists’ papers, to make new pieces that are collaborations across long distances and with people I may never meet.