Erin Frances Brown is a Canadian artist based in Treaty One Territory, Winnipeg.

Brown creates biomorphic painted reliefs that merge nature with internal experience and play in the zone between abstraction and representation.

Her work explores biophilia, the innate human tendency to seek connections with nature and other lifeforms. Brown begins with her environment, searching for connection points – natural shapes that her mind interlocks with somehow, but the reason is often unclear. In her studio, she puzzles over the bond, intuitively working and re-working the forms in modelling clay, then later in paint, gradually transforming leaves into quasi-abstract scenes that suggest fantasies, mental states, and sensorial experiences.

Brown also plays with the interaction of relief and painting to manipulate the viewer’s perception of space, light, surface, and shadow. They must walk around the reliefs to determine illusion from reality and find hidden details, adding a performative element to the work.

CV (PDF)