About Erin Powell

Erin Powell is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She is currently a Senior Bachelor’s of Fine Art Candidate at Winthrop University.

Using an interdisciplinary approach involving photography, text, video and sculpture, I investigate the human experience and its relationship with time. My work often derives from a series of attempts to systematically dissect and organize elements of my own past in order to reveal emotions and experiences shared among humans. This process enables me to specifically explore concepts of impermanence and failure through meticulous deconstruction of memory and perception. My motivation to create work is fueled by a desire to clarify the moments that have made up my existence and how they have shaped my perspective and personality.

I attribute this compulsion to reanalyze my past largely to the overwhelming uncertainty I felt during my childhood. Born with a condition requiring immediate surgical intervention followed by an arduous string of 18 additional procedures, I spent the first four years of my life unsure of what to expect and without real certainty of a future. These circumstances forced me to prematurely confront the futility of my body and greatly skewed my perception of the world around me. As a result, I am particularly interested in studying the fragility of the human body and how its functions inevitably decline as time progresses. I use this universal concept of impermanence to help dictate which memories and experiences I examine within my work.

Employing traditional research methods and a variety of media, I often devise methodical, clinical approaches to explore situations or concepts that carry great emotional weight. By using objectivity to investigate sensitive topics, I separate the intangible from the physical and delineate the space that exists between fact and fiction. Bounded by, yet separate from both raw emotion and pure evidence, this abstract space between represents a third entity that I find references the innate discordance within human experience that exists between our internal perceptions of reality and the actuality of the extrinsic forces that surround us. In an act of my own humanity, I struggle to reconcile this duality of truth as I search for meaning within the metaphysical interval of the unknown.