about my work

I am interested in poetry as the honing of words in a space into essential meaning. So it is with my visual language. Lines and shapes are ordered and harmonized to reveal their mythic and universal sources.

I began my visual studies as a painter but now my work is digitally created. This enables me to explore concurrent transparent layers, intricate pattern repetitions, and subtle color gradients. It also allows for the piece to decide it’s size as it develops and to undergo as many edits as my written poems.

The natural world is abundant in complex forms and textures, and the camera is a wonderful tool for capturing them with tactile exactitude. I also use photography as a collector of flora, fauna and iconographic objects. These I place carefully in the picture plane as you would precious relics in a decorative box.

The motif of windows and doors often appears in my work. This imagery best describes my fascination with the fragile boundary between inside and outside space; between substance and nothingness. As an artist, I am always trying to decode the messages in the hidden world around me, James Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible,” and to reflect back the magic and alchemy I find there.

Erika Joy Steffen