Sarita Westrup
’continuous nurture’
March 29- May 10, 2025

Erin Cluley Projects
150 Manufacturing Blvd.
Dallas, Texas

images by Loam Marketing

Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 9, 6 – 8pm 
In Conjunction with Dallas Art Fair Design District Gallery Night
exhibition preview

Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce continuous nurture, an exhibition of work by Texas-native, North Carolina-based fiber artist Sarita Westrup. The exhibition will debut  new sculpture completed during the artist’s one-year residency at the Penland School of  Craft in Western North Carolina. Replicating forms from nature and the built environment,  Westrup’s weaving reimagines surroundings from her childhood growing up in McAllen, a  border town in Texas. Her sculptural tunnels, archways, and loops reference vernacular  architecture along the Mexican American border and human body parts, extending these  forms into nurturing woven composites. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the  devastation it brought to the Carolinas in 2024, continuous nurture shows Westrup turning  inwards, with her work following suit, to the comforting center of the body. Her new work emphasizes the warming heart of interwoven forms, and the disconnect migration enacts  on our physical and mental presences.

Westrup’s approach to basketry focuses on repetition of shape and organic forms. The  artist’s use of reed, cochineal ink, a traditional organic dye of the Americas, and mortar transforms everyday objects, such as bags her father brought to her from craftspeople in  Mexico as a child. Like geopolitical borders, her sculptures balance openness with  obscurity. continuous nurture presents baskets woven around Westrup’s lower body. These disconnected thighs, calves, and feet are molded from life-sized casts; they explore  the effects of recent travels as she left the weather stricken East Coast for refuge in her  home state of Texas, then back to her studio at Penland. dispersion and home (2025) positions fragments of Westrup’s legs in wire around a thin tube basket with crimson  coloring. The wire leg fragments are transparent, allowing an intimate view into the  uncovered parts of her. A looping “umbilical cord” shape connects Westrup’s disparate  parts into a loose portrait of her moving body among the world.  

The work in continuous nurture situates itself in the physical memory of Westrup. Abstract and representational subjects come from specific places in her past and present, pointing  towards personal and collective futures. In the artist’s work, baskets are a symbol of  nourishment and comfort. Holding the shape of their molds, Westrup’s baskets console the outline of things: this consolation is then frozen in place. Weaving acts as an analogue  for crossing language, cultural, and corporeal boundaries throughout her life. The flowing  state of her lived experience holds for a moment between interlaced reeds.  

continuous nurture will be the artist’s second solo presentation with Erin Cluley Gallery. It  will be exhibited concurrently with an exhibition of new work by Chul-Hyun Ahn.

- by Harrison Blake of Erin Cluley Gallery

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