Universal Spirit

Working in a coffee shop, Erin Currier was fascinated with the amount of trash the shop produced.

She began making portraits of local people as buddhas, their clothing and backgrounds composed of the shop’s detritus. She portrayed regular people—day laborers and people who perform the lowliest of tasks—not the dignitaries and royalty usually associated with portraits.

She and her late husband, Anthony Hassett, saved up their money and began a series of world travels, meeting and living among the common people of the countries they visited—and collecting trash. Based on her experiences and her detailed sketchbooks, she returned to her studio and painted portraits of the people she had met adding bits of trash either for color or with cryptic texts which, taken out of context, had a special connection with the subject. Her subjects have been a combination of workers, people who are involved in “the struggle for human rights,” many of whom are “women with no voice.”