Erin Menelaws-McCririe is an artist and writer concerned with the intersection of visual art and philosophy as a means of translating intermediate spaces we pass through and regress to. Working predominantly in hand-sewn and embroidered soft sculptures, thinking of the act of hand sewing as a tool for weaving semiotic thread through and returning to repetition of what is near and reformatting what is familiar; repetition, not reproduction. Menelaws-McCririe’s work derives from her sustained writing practice, which focuses on short-format free verse pieces that champion the sheer materiality of language, concerned with the movement of language rather than the form or structure a sentence can or should take—imagining how the words interact not just with the next in a uniform line, but how they can revolt to create a dialogue within themselves through placement and displacement. Patterns in how we communicate are of fundamental interest to how Menelaws-McCririe functions as an artist and person, what takes hold of us in a fit of repetition and what is to stand alone and stagnant within us.
About
Erin Menelaws-McCririe is a recent Art and Philosophy graduate from Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design
Projects
Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design graduates’ degree show 2025
Erin Menelaws-McCririe's work focuses on themes of embodied feminism and bodily autonomy in an epoch of degradation of alienated labour. Utilising cyber feminist philosophies with a particular focus on the motif of cyborgs as a way of translating and understanding the historical and social devaluation of female-centric labour. Thinking of cyberfeminism as a space to engage in intersectionality, the cyborg places itself as a creature in a post-gender world, untethered to the Western proclamation of original unity; the cyborg opens itself to us as a tool for historical transformation. Menelaws-McCririe works in hand embroidery and soft sculpture; her use of repetitive labour is a medium in its own right, a form of meditation. Her work stands in contextual conversation with Donna Haraway’s‘a cyborg Manifesto,’ with a broader influence on philosophical materialism.
Menelaws-McCririe's use of hand embroidery weaves a semiotic thread between the underrecognised strain of domestic labour women carry, particularly in the maternal role, which women are sold as a natural reward in contrast to the utilisation of technology to formulate humanoid robots that blur the lines of what it means to be human. She highlights a perceived ironic faith in the image of the cyborg who corrupts the natural and the seductive draw to organic wholeness. Yet the cyborg echoes the domination of abstract individualisation fostered in the West.
book of original poetry written in response to being awarded Rosie’s Disobedient Press x Maria Fusco working class writers bursary, “My Mother the Machine and the Unalienated Labour of Love”
written in both text and binary code in the form of a reversible book
email me directly at: erin.menelaws.m@gmail.com
I am open to commissions.
Contact