About Erin Bird
Artist statement
From Erosion to Emergence
Water takes centuries to transform what it touches. My art honors that patient shift—where remnants of my past dissolve, giving rise to something unexpected and new. In an era defined by displacement and cultural anxiety, my work explores how memory and identity fracture and reform, offering an urgent reflection on shared vulnerability and resilience.
As a first-generation Irish-American and daughter of a political activist during The Troubles, my childhood home was steeped in nationalistic fervor, political propaganda, and the charged assertion that my true identity was Irish, not American. Simultaneously, my mother carried another hidden narrative—one of abuse and silent suffering—which subtly permeated our family life. Growing up within intertwined legacies of inherited trauma—political upheaval from my father’s activism and emotional wounds from my mother's past—I found myself in spaces of concealment and silence, with revelation and acknowledgment only occasionally breaking through.
Presenting figurative works alongside abstract ones creates an intentional dialogue: the recognizable self beside its liberated abstraction, prompting viewers to reflect on their own negotiations between identity, freedom, and constraint.
Water, for me, is both material and metaphor—dissolving rigid narratives while nurturing possibilities of reconciliation. Embracing water’s unpredictable movements, my work mirrors the interplay between rational thought and unconscious impulse. Each piece becomes a symbolic baptism, immersing personal and intergenerational histories into cycles of mourning and rebirth.
I developed the innovative technique of “waterprinting,” harnessing water’s erosive power to redefine photography’s relationship with painting, deliberately blurring traditional distinctions between image and abstraction. Through this fluid process, representational photographs merge with painterly abstraction, echoing memory’s instability—its ability to erode, shift, and reform.
Even the most stubborn substrate eventually yields to water’s insistent process of solubility and change—offering a contemplative space where transformation and renewal become possible.
Bio
Erin Bird (b. 1978) is a UK-based American artist, known for her distinctive “waterprinting” technique—a hybrid process that merges photographic imagery with painterly abstraction through the elemental force of water. Born to Irish immigrants in Upstate New York, Bird’s work navigates themes of memory, inherited trauma, and transformation, often rooted in her personal history of cultural dislocation and intergenerational silence.
She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA from Camberwell College of Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Bankside Gallery and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and is held in significant private and corporate collections such as Fontainebleau Las Vegas, The Set, Hudson Yards NYC, and collections in London, Los Angeles, and Delray Beach, Florida.
Bird has been shortlisted for the Jackson’s Painting Prize (2024), the Gilchrist-Fisher Award for landscape painting, and the Lumen Prize for Art & Technology.