Erin Morrison

As an artist, I find that maintaining an openness to a range of mediums gives me the latitude to explore my subjects in a more holistic way. Through printmaking, collage, sculpture, and painting, my practice centers on enduring concerns of labor, reproduction, capital, the body, and my immediate environment.

While living in Hong Kong during the pandemic, I began making collages from hand-painted Chinese calligraphy papers alongside my five-year-old son. The exercise of cutting vibrant papers into distinct shapes and puzzling them into cohesive compositions became a way to connect through a spontaneous process during a period that felt incredibly tense and confusing. These collages introduced a structural playfulness that opened up entirely new ways of approaching my painted relief works. This exploration of form and seriality subsequently expanded during a printmaking residency in Sicily in 2023, and later informed a private commission of large-scale works on paper in Cabo San Lucas.

Many of the works included in this submission operate in pairs or structured groupings, where the physical act of cutting out a shape automatically dictates its negative space—a byproduct that is then salvaged and used in subsequent compositions. This iterative process forms a distinct design methodology. Within these selected pieces, a recurrent lexicon of symbols emerges: the hand, the eye, wave forms, and graphic allusions to landscape.