B.1980
Erica Eyres PhD is a Glasgow-based visual artist. Favouring an absurd aesthetic as the artist works between drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, installation and video, Eyres’ inter-disciplinary practice unpacks the complex ways in which social categories relating to womanhood, domesticity, heterosexuality, the amateur and the ordinary are constructed and embodied.
Erica Eyres’s paintings and drawings mostly take their source material from vintage pornographic magazines. Caught somewhere between spontaneous fun and self-conscious affectation, the women in Eyres’ paintings resist any idea of eroticised passivity. Instead, the artist amplifies an uncanny sense of psychological interiority, subverting the expectations of shallow surface stimulation that define pornographic visual coding.
Ceramic reproductions of junk food items, culinary detritus, ashtrays, halloween props and inflatable dolls have come to play an increasingly large role in Eyre’s practice in recent years. Humorous, anti-climatic and yet strangely poignant, Eyres’ ceramics elevate the remnants of impulsive consumption. By preserving the material forms of cheap perishables and mass-produced novelties, Eyres locates the overlooked formal patterns in much of our contemporary consumer societies and elevates an aesthetic of disposability to the register of high culture.
Throughout her work, Eyres renders realistic depictions that are divorced from the “real” figures and scenarios that are their reference points. Leaning into ideas of the grotesque and the ridiculous. Erica Eyres uses an aesthetic of excess to locate the boundaries that structure our most commonly accepted thoughts, behaviours and associations.
Erica Eyres received a PhD from Northumbria University in 2019 after completing an MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2004, with an exchange placement at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2003, and a BFA at University of Manitoba in 2002. She was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017 and 2024.
