About the Artist
Erin Noel Hogan is a textile artist from Athens, OH
In her current role as a librarian with the Athens County Public Libraries at the Athens branch, she assists in planning and orchestrating educational and recreational library programs for adults. Her artistic process is informed and enhanced by the discipline and play she finds in her practices of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and yoga.
Always drawing wildly as a child (including many dragons!), Erin has been creative for as long as she can remember. Her other childhood crafting passions included using a blender to turn junk mail into one-of-a-kind cards through the alchemy of papermaking, and mostly non-traditional Pysanky eggs, using beeswax and dye to transmute every sort of design onto the surface of duck eggs from her family’s farm, including petroglyphs and stone textures inspired by a family vacation to the Southwest.
Erin began her university studies at College of The Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Taught by the expert guidance of fine artist Ernest McMullen, in a 2-D design class there she drew the dragon that would become her logo, and a beginning ceramics class instilled a love of playing with clay that blossomed into the horn, teeth, eye, and claw beads Erin handcrafted at The Dairy Barn Arts Center’s ceramics studio to ornament the dragons she makes now.
In 2009 Erin transferred to Ohio University and began studying theater costume as part of her Bachelor of Specialized Studies degree, which she earned in 2010. It was here she learned to sew, and she fell in love with corsetmaking, which became her primary creative expression for the following decade.
In addition to her history drawing dragons, over this time Erin also completed several toy dragons from the Smallwork dragon pattern by Melinda Small Patterson as gifts for family. She credits this fine artist with some of the inspiration and construction methods for her own current dragon pieces.
Interested in helping to redirect some of the vast fabric waste stream to new homes, in 2018 Erin began as a volunteer for ReUse Industries. From there she started running their vintage fabric Etsy shop, and then their secondhand craft and fabric store, ReUse on Union, helping people’s creative collections find new life in others’ imaginations. In 2019, ReUse on Union added an upcycling consignment boutique, intent on showcasing the region’s talents in repurposing materials. Given only an empty retail room, access to the organization’s thrift store, and this idea to work with, Erin designed the boutique from scratch, spending many hours furnishing and decorating the interior, and curated over 30 local artists to fill the shelves and give them a venue to sell their one-of-a-kind upcycled wares.
She ran monthly art openings featuring each artist in turn and partnering with local restaurants and musicians to sponsor the events with live music and refreshments. She also hosted multiple monthly sip-and-sew events in the store, where participants could come and play sewing an upcycled project with friends while imbibing a nice glass of wine.
In 2019 Erin also took over as manager of the Athens Makerspace, next door to ReUse on Union. In addition to all of the above, Erin organized classes by area makers in wood, metal, electronics, fiber arts, and vintage sewing machine refurbishment, as well as teaching classes in corsetmaking herself.
As part of her work as Makerspace manager, Erin assisted in orchestrating the 4th and 5th Annual ReUse Competitions, seeking out exceptional upcyclers in our area to recognize their efforts creating beauty from the waste stream.
Art by Kyle Look. Upcycled Piano Bar
In 2019, while working at ReUse, Erin was asked if she could handcraft a 6-foot dragon puppet for the Ohio University Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The show’s costumer, Nellie Werger, gifted Erin with scraps from the Queen of the Night’s iridescent blue and purple dress. Combining these scraps with upcycled chicken wire, t-shirt, and upcycled sequined and beaded women’s blouses, Erin sculpted her very first dragon from scratch, entirely freehanding her design and construction. And a love affair was born.
No story of Erin’s artistic journey would be complete without a nod to her co-conspirator in joy, Bagheera. Affectionately known as Baggy for his innate playfulness, this feline has been an ever-present companion to her process of creating dragons, always happy to helpfully sit upon (or maniacally attack) the project of the day. But most crucially, his soulful presence and determined groundedness in all things silly has been a most medicinal guiding force in her creative process.
Acknowledgements:
Erin feels deeply the gift of all the people who have helped her in getting this far in her personal and artistic journey and wishes to express her sincerest gratitude for all these souls have graced her life with through their time, presence, and skills.
Prominent in her personal mythology and iconography and intensely grounding to her artistic process has been the artistry found in multiple elements of the Game of Thrones television series based upon the books of George R.R. Martin. She has found particularly inspiring the archetype of Daenerys Targaryen as a Mother of Dragons, and the incredible soundtracks for the show by Ramin Djawadi – most specifically: the gorgeous finale piece for the show’s six season, The Winds of Winter. She wishes to thank these artists for their influence.
She would like to directly express her deep appreciation and gratitude to Erika Galentin, Ryan LaFever, Emily Beveridge, Danette Pratt, The Dairy Barn Arts Center, Lanna Galloway, Nellie Werger, ReUse Industries, the Community Makerspace, Kelly Shaw, her mother, Mary Clayton Hogan, Eva Alexander, Nate Kojun Hayes, Jessica Rose Hooker, her coworkers at the Athens County Public Libraries, Jacques Angelino, June Holley, Heidi Ann Pendergast, Robin Rector Krupp, Lynette Christiansen, Peggy Gish, Caitlin Kraus, Liz Vandendries, Eight North Court Street, LLC, Myke Linscott and the Athens Uptown Art Hop, Kelly Kalfs Lawrence, Wenda Sheard, Ahmed Hamed, Samantha Kruse, the Look Family, Ernest McMullen, Greg McKeown, Melinda Small Patterson, her community at One Academy Athens, Yoga with Kassandra, and the innumerable other friends who have supported her journey towards her very first art show, and kept her going through tough times with hugs, laughter, food, collaborative scheming, financial gifts, and sharing mutual delight in inspiration and dragons.
Erin created this ensemble in 2012 as a Halloween costume. The base layer is a late-1800s corset of her own creation [with the fashion fabric layer handcrafted from a vintage black rayon satin skirt and incorporating freehanded fabric flowers with garnet bead accents]. She had previously worked a summer internship with Ohio Valley Summer Theater during their production of Oliver! and was lucky enough to take home a red skirt made for a chorus member of that show.
Always passionate about upcycling, for this outfit she designed a full circle skirt out of a black cotton sateen stripe king-size duvet cover and incorporated the red piece as a visually-anchoring overskirt. Erin paired these bespoke elements with a found tricorn hat and modern garments to complete her garb.
Photo credit: Linzie McDargh
