Erin McCluskey Wheeler sees the world as a collage waiting to happen. Whether through paint, paper, or poetry, she finds meaning in what’s collected along the way, turning fragments of memory and material into art that connects the past with the present.
What first sparked your love for collage and mixed media?
I’ve always been a collector and most interested in the arrangement of objects more than recreating or rendering.
I’ve always wanted to be an artist but was not the typical “art kid” in school, meaning I could not impress anyone with my drawing skills. But I loved picking up things that I found and making boxes and books of found materials.
I liked writing about what I saw more than I liked drawing what I saw and I kept scrapbooks rather than sketchbooks. I took art classes at a community art center when I was a kid and my teacher always encouraged us to start with a small element, then add it to a bigger piece.
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When I got to college, I struggled with drawing and painting, and gravitated towards photography, printmaking, installation and performance art. One of my professors invited me to co-teach a class on collage when I was an undergraduate – recognizing early that this was my most fluent medium.
You blend painting, collage, poetry and more. How did this interdisciplinary approach evolve for you?
Often in my visual art, I am trying to solve a problem or answer a question about color combinations or construction. I am thinking through an idea by moving paper around and assembling collages.
When I write, I am thinking about words in combination with each but I am thinking about the visual images those words evoke. But I am thinking about telling a story more explicitly that I do in my visual art.
Sometimes one medium is better than another.
Recently I made a large shadow box piece that I wanted to include elements of dreams and feelings about the loss of my mother. I got stuck midway through making the piece and wasn’t sure what to do next. So I wrote a poem and those images and ideas helped me figure out what to do next in the art piece.
And it’s funny: having ignored painting for so long, I now find that I can do a lot more with paint than just make painted paper for collage.
Walking and collecting materials is a key part of your process. How did that ritual begin?
Walking is my favorite form of exercise, of being out in the world, of exploring, and of socializing. Sometimes I am intentional in my walking and collecting (often best done alone) but other times I just collect automatically as I walk.
Tell us more about your creative space.
I rent a large private studio space in a building with other artists that is about 15 minutes away from my house. I’ve been there for a little over three years now.
I have two large (8’ x 4’) tables to work on and wall space to pin up finished and unfinished work. I have a desk for teaching my online art classes from and another table for note taking, eating lunch, or just sitting.
I like to move around a lot and have multiple projects going at once but I also like being able to clean my space up completely and start new things.
I have lots of storage and it’s very organized. Other artists give me a lot of supplies and materials and I’m very good about passing on anything I won’t need or use.
Do you have a favorite storage system for all of your collected items? Or, do you rediscover forgotten treasures?
I have a large set of flat files and these are organized from materials to finished work and from top to bottom: Painted Paper, Works in Progress, White Paper, Color Paper, Found Paper, Works on Paper, Works on Panels, Prints, Archive, and Art Collection (other artists work).
Within Found Paper, I have this subdivided by Wallpaper, Instructional Manuals, and then image files: Patterns, Space, Women Asleep, Hands, Flowers, Architecture.
In the Painted Paper drawer, the papers are sorted roughly into four color piles. Once a year, I take everything out and re-sort to it and remove anything I’m not excited to use.
I have one bin of all my plastic collected from the beach (and I try to keep this very minimal) and one bin of all my sculptural and shadowbox materials. I have many, many, bins of teaching supplies. I have a large bin of scrap paper that I use to put together my collage paper kits.
I have a very strong visual memory so while there is a sense of rediscovery, I’m also pretty good at remembering where things are and what I have.
How does your writing practice feed your visual work?
Sometimes if I get stuck on a visual art piece, I will try writing about the thing I am trying to get across visually. A list of words or a loose poem can help me move past that sticking point in a visual piece of art.
I published a book in 2024, Dandelions, with National Monument Press that was both my writing and my photography. Dandelions is a documentation of the final years of my mother’s life with Alzheimer’s disease. This is my story of caregiving and finding beauty in small acts of walking and collecting flowers. The long essay is paired with images that capture these fleeting moments. Dandelions is a book that moves through grief while presenting the ever present glimmers of life around us. I am still always thinking about my parents’ final years with early onset dementia and their deaths. Sometimes I find ways to express this with words; other times with color, line, and shapes.
Building on that, how did your experiences caring for your parents with early-onset dementia influence and show up in your work?
Ten years ago my parents were diagnosed with Parkinson’s with Lewy Body Dementia (dad) and early onset Alzheimer’s (mom) and their house burned down in the 2015 Butte wildfire.
Ten years ago I also decided that I needed to be an artist.
Those events are all related. It was clear to me that my life – taking care of my parents and navigating their ever changing needs while raising a then four year old, recovering from thyroid cancer, and navigating a divorce – was going to be really hard.
It also occurred to me that there were no guarantees of an easy future. So the fact that I am an artist at all, is in large part due to my caregiving experience. That in combination with losing everything in a wildfire made me think about what we keep and what is lost. I have always loved old found photographs but these took on a new level of interest after losing almost all of my family photos.
I think of my art practice as restoring and rebuilding images and shapes – but also me.
Every year I make a painted paper collage piece of Mount Tam in memory of my mom. The nice thing is that these pieces really resonate with people. I’d make them anyway but it’s lovely to sell them to people who love Mount Tam for their own reasons.
Do you follow one project at a time or juggle several at the same time?
I always have multiple projects going at the same time and many of them are ongoing projects that I circle back to and take breaks from as needed.
I have a huge stack of vintage car ads and I will select an ad and repaint the background so that the car and driver are driving through an imagined landscape.
I do sometimes have large commissions for hotels, health care facilities, schools, and private clients. I like to learn new things and am right now working on chalk or soft pastel drawings. I am often working on acrylic paintings, collecting plastic for more mosaics, or building quick collages with my collections of paper.
How does teaching inform your own creative practice and process?
I teach 3 – 4 classes a week and make demonstration pieces during class – sometimes unfinished – but these keep me filled with ideas.
Sometimes a demonstration piece will lead to a more finished work that might go on to be licensed with Minted or lead to a new body of work. I incorporate a lot of art history in my classes so I often feel like my art making is making work in conversation with these other artists whose work I love.
Your mantra “it’s just paper” resonates with many. Can you tell us more about that philosophy?
Yes! I tell my students this all the time! I have been teaching art classes to adults for ten years now and students, especially the collage students, are so nervous about using that special paper they’ve been holding on to for years and years.
Students will make color copies of papers and photos in order to avoid cutting up the actual paper. It’s just paper and you’re going to use it for making YOUR art and that’s the highest calling of any paper out there.
Tell us more about starting to quilt. How has your experience with collage and paper informed your new quilting journey?
I’m obsessed with English Paper Piece quilting.
I had a feeling I would really like this form of quilting more than others because I don’t like to iron and I don’t really like being stuck behind a sewing machine.
I’m working on one quilt very slowly and I like that it is portable, is not connected to my marketable art practice, and that I can include fabrics designed by friends and given to me by friends.
I like organizing and putting together each individual hexagon and then placing it carefully next to the other connected hexagons. There are a million different colors and fabrics in my quilt but I thought really hard about each and every one.
If you were to pass along one piece of creative advice to your younger self, what would it be?
Please keep making art and don’t stop for the 12 years when you were scared of being an artist!
There are so many ways of being an artist and the only way to count yourself as an artist is to make art. You don’t need to show it, sell it, or share it – just make it.
Make all the weird art. Make the art you want to make. Try out all the ideas.
Learn as many tangible skills as you can and don’t worry if you don’t keep doing any of them. Keep coming back to the things that bring you the most joy.
Where can people see your work?
My website at erinmwheeler.com and on Instagram @erinmwheeler.
This year I’m focusing on teaching and making new work. I don’t have any shows coming up but I am teaching all the time both online and in person classes. Online I teach with 92NY, Case for Making, and Creativebug.
I’ll have a new 30-day daily practice collage class coming out with Creativebug in January 2026.
In person I teach at Richmond Art Center, mighty mighty studio, Case for Making, Arts Benicia, and wherever else I am invited to teach!
Interview posted October 2025
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