Erin Louise Gould : all that i have
Erin Louise Gould
all that I have
No Land
54½ E. San Francisco Street, #7
Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 21 - October 24, 2020
If you know where to look, you can find the Kentucky coffee tree scattered in parking lots and traffic medians across the city of Albuquerque, where it has found a home as an ‘urban development tree.’ Over the past two years, Erin Louise Gould’s art practice has centered on this rare tree and its peculiar story. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder, Gould has used her art practice to tackle issues relating to the body and its idiosyncrasies, desires, and seeming contradictions. In her newest body of work, Gould gradually unearths the story of the Kentucky coffee tree while interweaving her own.
All That I Have is an exhibition of printmaking, sculpture, video, writing, and found object installation that tells this intertwined story of life, loss, and multi-species resilience. It opens Saturday, March 21 and remains on view through October 24th.
The Kentucky coffee tree’s seedpods are enormous. When the seasons change and they shed their leaves, their giant, leathery seedpods remain, clinging to branches like they’d been left behind. “Originally, they would be shaken down by a wooly mammoth,” Gould says. “Now they just stay up there until they are knocked down by the wind.” Their halcyon days were millennia ago, when their evolutionary partners, wooly mammoths and other megafauna, roamed across North America and helped to disperse their seeds. Their seed coats are too thick for any present-day North American animal to chew and digest; their seedpods themselves filled with sweet—but highly toxic—pulp. The tree is often referred to as an evolutionary anachronism, or more severely, as “the dead tree.”
Today, they are planted for their ability to give shade and withstand the stressors of the urban environment, including many in Albuquerque, where Gould first discovered them. A current graduate student at the University of New Mexico, she visits many of the trees regularly to collect their fallen seeds and seedpods and build relationships, both of which she builds into her immersive installation at No Land. Incorporating atmospheric plays of light, shadow, and reflection, the installation gives off the sense of a ghostly tension between presence and absence.
While many Kentucky coffee trees still populate the country, they have spent the last ten thousand years producing the same cumbersome seedpods and impervious seed coats. Most of them simply never have the chance to germinate, thanks to its own genetic design—a biological challenge that Gould finds herself relating to when reflecting on her own autoimmune disease. “I find myself particularly drawn to my Kentucky coffee tree friends when I feel this way,” she writes in Seeds and Dead Things Alike , a booklet of writing and poetry accompanying the exhibition. “They, too, are overbuilt, overprotected to the point of self-harm.” Several short videos showing Gould with the trees will be on view, including “ I Long to be Arboreal,” a piece that draws bodily comparisons between the Kentucky coffee tree and Gould herself.
All That I Have also features works by Gould in relief printmaking and cast sculpture made from cardboard pulp. In other sculptures, she uses materials such as hair, metal mesh, and rawhide that seem to have been molded around objects that are no longer present. “I’m interested in casting and printmaking as a physical memory, an echo, of an object that is no longer here,” Gould says. The majority of the materials throughout the exhibition were given to or found by Gould, who considers all of these objects, whether they be human or plant made, collected in a parking lot or specifically given to her, to be gifts. By limiting the work to such materials, she is contemplating gratitude and the harms done under capitalism, colonialism, and human exceptionalism, in which beings are considered objects rather than subjects.
Despite their “dead tree” moniker, the Kentucky coffee tree is hardy and tough, drought resistant and pollution resistant. Gould has noticed some trees seeming to propagate in the median near the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, where she speculates that cars must be running over their seedpods and shooting the seeds back into the median—the only way that they could be shedding their seed coat. “Maybe the Kentucky coffee tree is living and evolving in a time scale that I cannot potentially comprehend,” she says. “Maybe they are waiting for a world that I cannot imagine.” Recently when traveling away from home, Gould remembers finding a small group of Kentucky coffee trees when she least expected to, and she broke down in tears. “Those particular trees didn’t know me, but still… When you build these kinds of intimate relationships with other species, there’s something kind of magical that happens—miraculous even.”
Erin Louise Gould is a multimedia artist working primarily with sculpture, video, and performance. She is currently attending the University of New Mexico to attain her MFA in sculpture and participated in the Land Arts of the American West program in 2018. Before moving to Albuquerque in 2017, she lived in Santa Fe for four years after finishing her Bachelors of Art degree at Colorado College in 2013. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder fed Gould’s interest in how we perceive and live inside our bodies and how our bodies sometimes seem to live without us.
