Biography
Erin Treacy creates vivid large-scale drawings, paintings, and three-dimensional sculptural assemblages, an artistic method she describes as a “tripod” of mediums. While all three forms are clearly informed by the others, each is particular in its realization. Treacy’s drawings feature fantastical, amorphous figures that take inspiration from the natural world. Her fluid linework and vibrant color palette evoke flowers, fallen tree boughs, insects, and underwater crustacean. Each drawing blurs the figurative boundary between the imaginative and the organic world.
Similarly, Treacy’s large-format paintings consist of overlapping layers of oil, acrylic, and charcoal. Together, they form an intricate web of alternating textures, calling out for touch. Using abstract and impressionistic forms, Treacy deconstructs the viewer’s sense of space and movement, with color and shape as our only guide. Sculptural assemblage forms the last leg of Treacy’s tripod. In these works, Treacy transforms the flattened 2-dimensional contours of her drawings and paintings into figural objects that are equally familiar and disorienting. She creates these works from “pieces of dismantled ‘successful’ paintings, recycled ‘failed’ paintings, and trimmings of still existing paintings,” she says. Such assemblages are fantasies come to life: tokens of the natural world, deconstructed, reformatted, and presented in an entirely new and intuitive perspective. Treacy’s work evokes all the beauty, vibrancy, and wonder of being in and of the world simultaneously.