Nicotine is poison, but so is looking back. One of the first bodies of work TR Ericsson made after his mother passed was a series of images created with the brand of cigarettes she chain smoked towards the end of her life. The artist recalls wanting to make a portrait of his mother through the materials that were close to her. He began with cigarettes and photographs creating a haunting series on nostalgia, poison and mortality.

For these works, Ericsson uses a silkscreen process, essentially an intensified version of the process through which his mother's white ceiling became stained yellow in the final years of her life. Digital photographs are burned into silkscreens. Subsequently the images are recreated in nicotine as ashtrays filled with smoldering cigarettes are placed beneath the screens, slowly creating pictorial stains while destroying the screen. The process requires anywhere from fifteen to six hundred cigarettes to create a single image. The results of this innovative conceptual appropriation of craft, are fragile, haunting and beautiful images that convey the “live, dream, die,” loop that turns throughout the artist’s larger body of work.

From a conversation between TR Ericsson and Roland Flexner -
ROLAND FLEXNER: 'What I like in the aspect of the ephemeral today, contrary to what was done in the past that was largely symbolic, is the fact that many artists are acting out the ephemeral rather than representing it. With the nicotine works, in some sense, you’ve chosen to make those objects come back on paper as poison. That probably has meaning.' “

TR Ericsson: “Bad Boy Billy Brat, that was her nickname for her third husband, they met at a local bar, his other nickname was Kawasaki Bill, everyone else had a Harley, he did some time in jail, more DUI’s than he could easily recall, last I knew he was still driving illegally with his dead brothers expired drivers license in his wallet.”