Suspended Figure, by Erica Grimm-Vance
A heart attack is an ugly thing. It conjures images of excessive cholesterol, clogged arteries, pulsing valves and ventricles, red-faced pot-bellied candidates, and yes, death.
Yet somehow, Erica Grimm-Vance makes it beautiful. The TWU Art professor has taken this seemingly ugly thing, and turned it into a compelling body of work.
As she describes the meshwork of cardiac muscles working overtime to maintain the current of blood that sustains her life, you begin to understand why, a year ago as she watched her own heart on a screen, in the midst of a life-saving angiogram, she was less afraid than in quiet awe.
“To see the heart actually beating; all of the veins and arteries were filling with blood and discharging, and it was all moving — it was so active. I couldn’t believe how much movement there was around my heart. It was so phenomenally beautiful. When I was being wheeled out of the angiogram the nurses said they had never seen anybody so happy! It was this amazing high to see my heart in motion on this monitor.”
As she speaks, Erica’s hands pump in little fists, mimicking the movement of her heart — drawing you in to the words she’s saying. As an artist she is ever using these hands to create things original and new, and today she is creating a story. It materializes through her movements and her slow rhythmic voice. It’s the story of death and recovery, but much more so, it’s a story of seeing.
“To see the heart actually beating...I couldn’t believe how much movement there was around my heart. It was so phenomenally beautiful.”
above: footage of Erica’s angiogram that will feature in an upcoming mixed-media piece.In the summer of 2008, in the middle of an evening swim at the Walnut Grove Community Centre, Erica’s heart failed. As she paddled through her weekly laps, the last remaining gap in her right coronary artery sealed shut.
“My art making is always about the human body — embodiment and liminality. So here I was having this very embodied experience and, honestly, the irony is not lost on me. God does have quite a sense of humour.”
Recent work at West Vancouver’s Bellevue Gallery depicts suspended figures—in that liminal space that Erica describes.
For those of us not versed in the western tradition of art and literary theory, “embodiment” refers to how the body tangibly manifests itself — how what we think, intuit, and feel is influenced by our bodies’ senses. Often this can be witnessed through the data that our body creates (yes, like an angiogram). “Liminality” means being in a transitional stage — being on both sides of a threshold — the threshold of life and death, for example, or knowing and unknowing.
“All we ‘know’ is mediated through the body,” Erica explains. “This is not solipsism but simply recognition that the body is all we have. Thought is not separable from brain, nerve endings, synapse, or dendrites — all are part of the body having material existence and enabling thought.”
For 30 years Erica has been making art and for 20 of them she’s also been making artists of Trinity Western students — teaching them to see in new ways and release their visual voice through colour theory, drawing, painting, and discovering the meaning and materials of art making. Her professional credits include more than 30 individual shows and 50 group shows. Her art can be seen in the Vatican’s world famous collection, and it was featured in the Hollywood film, Catwoman. Her ethereal human figures painted on wood, steel, and wax are instantly recognizable to many a TWU student and alumnus. When her heart attack came she had just completed the course work for her doctorate in Art Education.
The artist, in her studio
Slim, fit, and 49, Erica was not a likely candidate for a heart attack. In fact, when it struck she felt little more than a heart palpitation and a shortness of breath. Mildly alarmed, she stepped out of the pool and found some TWU students in the hot tub. But in the midst of talking about the art program and the University, she says she sensed an odd inner voice telling her repeatedly to pay attention.
Paying attention, from that moment, became the theme of the year ahead, of her art, and her recovery.
“Atypical angina often occurs in young women. Most women die of it because they don’t even know they’re having a heart attack. There’s no radiating pain or huge pressure, just a shortness of breath, cold sweat and a bit of pain in your back. Many women would just ignore it, go to sleep, and not wake up.”
With only these symptoms, Erica called for help. An ambulance arrived and paramedics diagnosed a panic attack. At Langley Memorial Hospital, an internist standing by determined Erica was actually in the midst of a life-threatening heart attack. “There was a flurry of activity and they put me in another ambulance headed for Royal Columbian,” says Erica. “By one o’clock in the morning, I was rolled out of the cath lab with a stint installed.”
“While it was happening, I didn’t realize how serious it was,” she says. “I didn’t realize I was dying, and it took me a long time to integrate — to realize how close I came.”
But even with this awareness, the lasting impact on Erica wasn’t fearing another heart attack or paying assiduous attention to her cholesterol intake (though she does), but simply learning how to see.
For a year, recovering was Erica’s sole occupation. “Your body doesn’t allow you to do anything,” she explains. “For months I would simply follow the sun through the house and sit in patches of sunlight. I can’t tell you how infrequently in my life I’ve sat in the sun on the porch.”
A woman accustomed to tackling any task presented to her by sheer dint of will, Erica initially resisted such an abrupt stop — attempting to go in to work or to paint. But, she found, “My body let me know on no uncertain terms — as one realizes when one’s pregnant — that there are bodily limitations. I learned the degree to which I needed to listen to my body and how much I had really stopped doing so.” Upon order of her doctor, Erica spent those 12 months paying attention — to her body, to the beauty of life and nature, and to every small, ordinary moment. “It was a process of listening and prayer. I learned that there is no such thing as the mundane, for one thing. I learned how incredibly beautiful every gesture is; to take nothing for granted — no day, no set of eyes — everything is a gift; to trust circumstances that God places you in; and to listen.”
Here Erica pauses in her storytelling. Emotion bubbles to the surface and her vibrant eyes turn glassy as she considers, “It was a year of realizing that we are surrounded at every moment by indescribable beauty, and unfathomable suffering, and profound joy.”
When a colleague gave Erica 30 sheep-skins, she resolved to make parchment from them, filming the process and integrating it into her artmaking. The process of shearing the skins, says Erica is not unlike healing from her heart attack: “It felt like an inward shearing and culling—stripping layers that were unnecessary, in order to become more real.”
This attentiveness, she explains, referencing the philosophers Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, is the first step in living a moral life. It is essential in honing our ability to hear and see God in daily life — to deepen our prayer and meditation. Being attentive to things outside of ourselves moves us beyond what she calls ‘solipsistic self-preoccupation’. Without paying attention, she says, “we only live on the surface and don’t ever become who we are fully intended to be. We can never be honest or self aware.”
Exactly a year after her swim with death, Erica has resumed teaching, painting, and her Ph.D. studies. But now the theme of attentiveness has woven itself into every aspect of her work. Encouraged by her professors at Simon Fraser University, Erica is integrating a response to her heart attack and recovery into her art. The animated image of her heart that Erica watched on the screen during her angiogram will find its way into one upcoming piece — layered with other visuals and projected on a steel sheet, this work will join a larger collection that will comprise her Ph.D. project.
It won’t be the first time medical data features in Erica’s art. A previous exhibition — Being, Text and Time — was replete with medical imagery. Her well-known human figures were layered over pet scans, EKG readings and MRI scans. So while Erica is not treading new territory with the addition of her angiogram in her upcoming body of work, this is the first time it’s been personal. “Inevitably, if you write or paint, a little bit of yourself ends up in there, but I’ve never really thought of my work as being biographical. This feels very different.”
By drawing from her own health crisis and recovery, Erica’s art is helping others to better see God and nature and the beauty of the intricate bodies He created for us — even in their shortcomings. “I learned that the body is what we are given and it’s God’s gift to us, and that communication happens through our bodies. If we don’t listen, we are cutting off one of our prime avenues of listening to God. That has been the theme of my art making for a long time, but I was invited to experience that at a more profound level. I hadn’t understood it previously. It was an invitation.”
To see a selection of Erica's work, visit the Bellevue Gallery.
by Amanda Smith Regier
photography by Mike Rathjen '04
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