About

Erica Ann Gajewski (born in Oshawa, Ontario) is a Canadian visual artist. An athlete from a young age, she achieved success in soccer and running at the provincial and national levels, which provided a gateway to education. She earned a full scholarship to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia, where she played collegiate soccer while earning her B.F.A., and later ran cross-country, captained the team her senior year, and eventually coached, while earning an M.F.A.

Gajewski’s artistic practice is grounded in a sustained engagement with other animals and a desire to understand who they are as sentient beings—how they perceive, experience, and move through the world, and how human and more-than-human lives are bound and entangled. To deepen her understanding of human–animal relationships, she pursued a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. Her interdisciplinary, research-based practice integrates environmental studies, human-animal studies, and visual art to examine human relations within multispecies worlds, with particular attention to how human actions impact biodiversity in the context of the ecological and climate crises.

Her recent land-based visual works focus on historical and contemporary human–animal relations in rural agricultural spaces in Southern Ontario, as witnessed through the material bodies of animals who depend on these environments. The work reveals the cumulative effects of what the Environmental Humanities scholar Rob Nixon terms “slow violence,” which ripple through the land and lives of other animals, and how small-scale farms can function as what anthropologist Anna Tsing terms “refugia,” island sites of biodiversity where reservoirs of species, which can be found in the hedgerows and old pastureland on small farms, can help to repopulate surrounding populations when sufficient habitat or wildlife corridors are restored. Along with safeguarding sites of refugia for species survival, her research also uncovers how localized acts of embodied care support species resilience and multispecies flourishing amid ecological change.

For decades, Gajewski has sought to visually articulate the worldly lives of the more-than-human animals she encounters, drawing on scientific, theoretical, historical, and embodied knowledge to create forms that honour their sentient, intelligent, and deeply emotional lives. Her work takes shape through drawing, painting, soft sculpture, and land-based practices—each functioning as a point of research and a gesture of ethical attention towards the beings she encounters.

Gajewski’s work has been shown globally and is held in private collections, including the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and Afghanistan, and the Toronto Zoo. Her work has appeared in publications such as New American Paintings and Undercurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, and in recent shows at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Meridian International Centre in Washington, DC.