Erin Paradis has been diligently earning opportunities and accolades in the state of Minnesota, pushing her work in scale and reach. The Jerome Ceramic Artist Project Grant provided an opportunity for her to focus even more pointedly on advancing her career. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant prior, which allowed her to equip a home studio with a kiln, and made it possible for her to increase her scale for her first solo show in Minneapolis in 2017. In 2018, she received an Open Studio Fellowship through Franconia Sculpture Park and installed her largest work to date. The Jerome award has allowed Paradis to upgrade her glaze area, acquire a HEPA filter for her studio, invest in computer hardware upgrades for the business side of her practice, and attend a workshop with Linda Lopez at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Her work is a recollection of spatial encounters, mimicking line, texture, and color. She abstractly materializes particular instances through installation of sculptural forms and their relationships to one another.
“In my studio practice, these encounters are translated into abstract drawings, sculptural ceramic objects, and reinterpretations of drawn imagery,” she explains.