Art with a delicate grace
Working through her grief, Virginia Beach artist creates miniature ceramic wedding dresses
IStaff Writer
n fall 2019, Erika Hitchcock sat at a table, her hands immersed in clay, needing to lose herself in something. Something other than pain.
She’d spent the year grieving and still couldn’t articulate it, but her artist’s fingers had rediscovered her favorite medium.
She started with the paragon of possibilities for getting lost: a wedding dress.
It took hours to sculpt the gown, which stood a little over a foot high, smoothing the A-line silhouette and carving the intricate appliques along the shoulders, V-neck and bodice.
Hitchcock lost herself in the beauty of the work and found a business.
Last summer, she launched StoneWear Ceramics, in which she produces miniature wedding dresses.
Technically, the retired high school art teacher can make any dress. Among her home boutique of mermaids and crystal-encrusted recreations is the voluminous confection Lady Gaga wore to perform at the recent presidential inauguration. (It is complete with the
oversized gold dove brooch.)
In Hitchcock’s “Stronger Than Stone” collection, a group of dresses that honor women she admires, is a flowing black robe of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died this past September. Its neckline is a beaded signature Bader collar. One white shoe, symbolizing her absence, peaks from underneath the billowy folds.
Hitchcock gets orders from brides, husbands hunting for an anniversary gift and women who’ve had their gowns boxed up for years but want to see them on a daily basis.
It is happiness for her clients and healing for Hitchcock.
“I’ve always loved wedding gowns. They are just beautiful,” Hitchcock said, “But they are so symbolic of life, promise and future. I think for me, it’s a symbol that you’re never going to be alone in the world.”
She paused.
“It’s hard when you’re alone.”
Not that Hitchcock knew what
that was like as a child. She was the second among four growing up in a rambunctious New Jersey family. She started studying interior design in college. Then she became pregnant, and she and her future husband relocated to his hometown of Virginia Beach to build their family.
She’d never been one to daydream of her own wedding gown. She got married in a kneelength dress she found at Macy’s. After her second child, Hitchcock returned to college and became a teacher. Taking care of her family and teaching never left much time for her own art.
When it did, dresses often cropped up in her work, and there were plenty when she’d think back to her childhood and her two sisters. She started experimenting with wedding dresses in clay about 10 years ago.
In 2018, Hitchcock was as busy as she’d ever been running the International Baccalaureate art program at Green Run High in Virginia Beach and creating internships for her students.
Then the baby of the family, her brother, Paul, the one who wrote poetry, played the guitar beautifully and shared her sense of humor, died. He was 41.
He’d developed schizoaffective disorder in his 20s and had been living in Colorado, where he’d graduated from college. Hitchcock said he wasn’t getting the proper medical care that he needed and was taking a variety of medications, including an antihistamine to balance the symptoms of the mental disorder.
He took too much. He passed, alone, on Dec. 18, 2018, and was found Christmas night.
“He was my best friend,” Hitchcock said.
Two weeks later, the family Yorkie, Rocky, died.
Then, in August 2019, Hitchcock and her husband were on a trip to Portugal. Hitchcock experienced a bout of dehydration and low blood pressure, passed out and crashed into a glass wall with a metal rail. Her chin and lip were split open and she suffered a severe concussion.
It took three months to recuperate. She decided to retire at the end of the year.
“I was just depleted,” she said. Her mom bought her a slab roller to work with her clay and told her to do something. Hitchcock obeyed. She refined how to work the earthy dough to resemble dainty lace, satiny ruffles and silk as it runs over a bride’s leg as she walks down the aisle.
She can glaze to match skin shades that peak through illusion sleeves and give that fine shimmer of an antique sheen. Hitchcock fires them in a kiln in her garage. Each dress takes at least 25 hours to complete.
“Every time I work, I feel close to my brother,” She said.
Inspiration is everywhere, she said: the “Say Yes to the Dress” wedding show, brides, the news.
Last summer, Hitchcock was plying an alabaster Viktor & Rolf strapless with a skirt of flowers and a cascade of tulle. News reports broke about Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African American man in Georgia who was jogging one day through a neighborhood. Two white men, assuming he was a burglar, jumped into a truck, chased him down and fatally shot him.
The jogger reminded Hitchcock of so many of her students, she said. She named the dress, “Arbery.”
Hitchcock was horrified when she saw the story of Lauren and Matt Urey of Richmond who were seriously injured while honeymooning in New Zealand. In December 2019, the two were with a tour group on White Island, home of an active volcano. It erupted that afternoon, spewing ash, rocks and toxic gas and killing 22 people. Matt Urey sustained burns over 80% of his body, and Lauren Urey was burned along her face, neck, stomach, hands and legs.
The couple was hospitalized separately at different facilities.
During a video interview, Lauren recalled how nervous she was for her husband to see her scarred. She feared that he would think she was ugly.
It made Hitchcock cry. She, too, had scars following her incident in Portugal. News stories often showed Urey in her wedding dress. Hitchcock created a sculpture, contacted Lauren through Facebook and eventually drove to deliver it to her as a gift. Lauren later posted a thanks on Facebook:
“She contacted me because our story touched her and she wanted to give back,” Urey wrote. “She’s such an amazing person and the detail of the sculpture is unbelievable! Her kindness moved me to tears and I just want to share her beautiful work with you all.”
That’s what Hitchcock needs. To know that she’s helping.
When she does sell her gowns
— they start at $450 — a portion of the proceeds go to local groups that support adults living with mental illness, she said. Her mother, Pat, who now lives in Virginia Beach, makes velvet and satin garment bags for each gown.
Hitchcock works in her home studio with a photo of a smiling Paul propped near a window. In front of her, she’ll pull up an image of a gown on a tablet and
Left: Hitchcock sculpted the gown of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The gown was created as part of Hitchcock’s series,“Stronger than Stone,” honoring women who have experienced lifealtering obstacles and persevered against incredible odds. the bride she wants to make smile. She can’t play music while she works. It reminds her too much of her brother. But he always talked about how lovely her ceramic work was.
“I feel that I’m healing,” she said. “I feel that I’m where I’m supposed to be right now.”
LA GOMERA, Spain — Sitting atop a cliff in the Canary Islands, Antonio Márquez Navarro issued an invitation — “Come over here, we’re going to slaughter the pig”— without speaking a word: He whistled it.
In the distance, three visiting hikers stopped dead in their tracks at the piercing sound bouncing off the walls of the ravine that separated them.
Márquez, 71, said that in his youth, when local shepherds rather than tourists walked the steep and rugged footpaths of his island, his news would have been greeted right away by a responding whistle, loud and clear.
But his message was lost on these hikers, and they soon resumed their trek on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic that is part of Spain.
Márquez is a proud guardian of La Gomera’s whistling language, which he called “the poetry of my island.” And, he added, “like poetry, whistling does not need to be useful in order to be special and beautiful.”
The whistling of the Indigenous people of La Gomera is mentioned in the 15th-century accounts of the explorers who paved the way for the Spanish conquest of the island. Over the centuries, the practice was adapted to communicating in Castilian Spanish.
The language substitutes whistled sounds that vary by pitch and length for written letters. Unfortunately, there are fewer whistles than there are letters in the Spanish alphabet, so a sound can have multiple meanings, causing misunderstandings.
The sounds made for a few Spanish words are the same — like “sí” (yes) or
“ti” (you) — as are those for some longer words that sound similar in spoken Spanish, like “gallina” or “ballena” (hen or whale).
“As part of a sentence, this animal reference is clear, but not if whistled on its own,” said Estefanía Mendoza, a teacher of the language.
In 2009, the island’s language, officially known as Silbo Gomero, was added by UNESCO to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; the United Nations agency
described it as “the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practiced by a large community,” in reference to La Gomera’s 22,000 inhabitants.
But with whistling no longer essential for communication, Silbo’s survival mostly relies on a 1999 law that made teaching it an obligatory part of La Gomera’s school curriculum.
On a recent morning at a school in the port town of Santiago, a classroom of 6-year-olds had little difficulty identifying the whistling sounds corresponding to different colors or the days of the week.
Things got trickier when the words were incorporated into full sentences, like “What is the name
of the child with the blue shoes?”
If interpreting a whistle isn’t always easy, making the correct sounds can be even harder. Most whistlers insert one bent knuckle into the mouth, but some use instead the tip of one or two fingers.
“The only rule is to find whichever finger makes it easier to whistle, and sometimes unfortunately nothing works at all,” said Francisco Correa, the coordinator of La Gomera’s school whistling program. “There are even some older people who have understood Silbo perfectly since childhood, but never got any clear sound to come out of their mouth.”
Two whistlers might struggle to understand each other, particularly during their first encounters — and need to ask each other to repeat sentences — like strangers who speak the same language with different accents. But “after whistling together for a while, their communication becomes as easy as if speaking Spanish,” Correa said.
With its distinct geography, it’s easy to see why whistling came into use on the Canaries; on most of the islands, deep ravines run from high peaks and plateaus down to the ocean, and plenty of time and effort are required to travel even a short distance overland. Whistling developed as a good alternative way to deliver a message, with its sound carrying farther than shouting — as much as 2 miles across some canyons.
Older residents on La Gomera recall how Silbo was used as a warning language, particularly when a police patrol was spotted searching for contraband.
Some other islands in the archipelago have their own whistling languages, but their use has faded, though another island, El Hierro, recently began teaching its version. “Silbo was not invented on La Gomera, but it is the island where it was best preserved,” said David Díaz Reyes, an ethnomusicologist.
Nowadays, La Gomera relies heavily on tourism, which has created an opportunity for some young whistlers like Lucía Darias Herrera, 16, who has a weekly whistling show at an island hotel. While she normally whistles Castilian Spanish, Darias can also adapt her Silbo to other languages spoken by her audience, on an island that is particularly popular with Germans.
Since last spring, however, the coronavirus has not only canceled such shows, but also forced schools to limit their whistling instruction. At a time of compulsory face masks, a teacher cannot help a student reposition a finger inside her mouth in order to whistle better.
Still, some teenagers enjoy whistling greetings to each other when they meet in town and welcome the chance to chat without many of the adults around them understanding. Some had parents who went to school before learning
Silbo became mandatory, or who settled on the island as adults.
Erin Gerhards, 15, sounded keen to improve her whistling and help safeguard the traditions of her island.
“It is a way to honor the people that lived here in the past,” she said.