ERIN MALLON
Erin Mallon (*1989, CA, USA) lives and works in Basel, CH. Her work as an artist and writer unites biographical and fictive elements to formulate questions about the role of the everyday in artistic production – and vice versa. Whether it’s in essays which investigate the narrating and reading instances’ proximity to the text; in stories which immerse the reader in the intimate space of a narrator’s sensorial reality; or in installations which reshape the receptive experience of a text; her work is concerned with situations, and the ways we make sense of things within them.
2009-2012: BA Art and design Education (HGK FHNW)
2012-2015: MA Art and design Education (HGK FHNW)
Mallon works as a freelance translator in the field of artistic research and as Coordinator for the Swiss Artistic Research Network (SARN). From 2015-2020 she was active in the artist collaboration Haystack News. She teaches regularly as a guest lecturer at the Institute for Art and Design Education at the HGK FHNW.
Her essay “Diese Vehemenz” was published in Narr #33: Adelheid Duvanel in 2022. She has exhibited, among others, at DOCK, Basel, CH; Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel, CH; MUU Center for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, FI; Chaynaya Fabrika, Odessa, UA; Spaceness Performance Festival, Longview, WA, USA. In 2022 she was an artist in residence at the Old Mine Residency in Outokumpu, FI.
Artist Statement
Erin Mallon’s writing is concerned with the ambiguity of belonging. In Ocean View, the reader follows a young woman during the course of a day and two nights on a trip to the city. Alice and her squirm travel with a slew of questions in tow: What’s history taste like, and how do you know when a story ends? What choices are really in your hands?
Alice’s story is propelled by the pursuit of a tug she can’t quite grasp, and Ocean View directs its attention as much at the emotional landscape as the material dispositions of Alice’s path. From the sensuous to the foul, a keen awareness for sensation – coupled with the narrator’s persistently self-ironic tone – reveal an immersive physicality in the most mundane situations and acts.
Ocean view appears in the frame of the CAP diploma festival in both English and German versions. Written and translated parallel into and out of each other, the two versions have lost their status of original and translation and stand as twin tellings of how a writing practice engages with its own conditions of production.