Erica Van Horn
Erica Van Horn, born in New Hampshire 1954, made her first book on the day that President Kennedy was shot in 1963. A Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, residential grants and fellowships gave her the means to travel.
The importance of staying on the move kept her work in portable formats, logically evolving into books. These began as one-of-a-kind folded objects and portable paintings, eventually becoming editions. There were also series of works; Envelope Interiors, Italian Lessons and Living Locally.
In The Book Remembers Everything (Granary Books and Coracle), Nancy Kuhl observed that Van Horn ‘regularly draws the subject of her work directly from the fabric of her daily life, the domestic and artistic work, the simple household objects at hand, the day-to-day aspects of family relationships’.
Living and working with poet, artist, and writer Simon Cutts since 1989, the two have made books, set up and ran galleries and bookshops from bases in Italy, London, Norfolk and France. Moving to Tipperary, in 1997, provided them space and time for both personal work and the shared projects and publications of Coracle.
In this carefully-crafted life, books, homes and gardens all require equal attention. An on-line journal kept for the last eighteen years distills local ways in rural Ireland. Everything always returns to the modest telling of a small event.
Alongside her ongoing work with Coracle, Van Horn has published books with, amongst others: Laurie Clark (Moschatel Press), Harry Gilonis (poet), Kate Van Houten (Estepa Editions), Thomas Meyer (Jargon Society) and Martin Rogers (founding director of Small Publishers Fair).
Books have been published by A Published Event (Tasmania), Alpha Decay (Barcelona), Éditions Héros-Limite (Geneva), Les Fugitives (London), Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn) and Uniformbooks (Axminster).
Erica Van Horn has been a participant at the Small Publishers Fair since the beginning. She is a supporter and friend to many in its community. It is an honour to celebrate her work.
Links for more
The Erica Van Horn papers, up to and including 2024, are held at The Beinecke Library at Yale. Find them here
To subscribe to Erica’s on-going journal of daily life in Tipperary click here
To read Dr. Julie Bates on Van Horn’s time in Ireland click here
