Erica Packer’s fiance opens up about their relationship
Erica Packer’s new fiance, Cuban artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, has revealed they bonded over “an interest in trying to hold emotions … with songs, with words and lyrics’’ during their 18-month relationship, Annette Sharp writes.
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Erica Packer’s new fiance, Cuban artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, has spoken for the first time publicly about the divorced mother-of-three and the poetry that has bonded the couple during their 18-month relationship.
Promoting his latest collection, The Tears Of Things, at LA’s Kohn Gallery last week, the popular sculptor and painter — whose work adorns the houses of Ridley Scott, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi — said he and Packer, ex-wife of billionaire businessman James Packer, related over “an interest in trying to hold emotions … with songs, with words and lyrics’’.
It’s more than a decade since Australians have associated Packer with musical ambition but fresh from a 1990s relationship with singer and actor Jason Donovan, started in 1994, the model from Gunnedah, then Erica Baxter, had been contemplating a musical career when media magnate and aspiring casino boss James Packer came along in 2002.
Packer would eventually help her achieve those ambitions through his connections at Sony and in 2007 her first album, Through My Eyes, was released. She is credited with writing eight tracks on the album.
She made a glamorous splash at the ARIA Awards and alongside Snoop Dogg at the MTV Australia Awards in 2006 before marriage to Packer beckoned in 2007 and her musical ambitions were sidelined.
Having moved to the US in 2013 and made a new life, as a single mother, there among LA’s creative community, it seems possible Packer has now started revisiting those early singer/songwriting dreams.
Martinez Celaya suggested so in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week: “ … there’s a connection there in some aspect of her view of life,” he said.
“Just the very fact that someone else has an interest in trying to hold emotions or hold what they’re going through in the world with songs, with words, and lyrics — that in itself is a point of connect.”
Packer was less cryptic in offering insight into her new partner and his grey, desolate work.
“He’s cool, calm and collected,” she said of the artist at work in his studio.
“He doesn’t go crazy. It's a very personal thing for him. But I think he draws from real life.”
Originally published as Erica Packer’s fiance opens up about their relationship