Erin Bodfish’s work invites viewers on a personal, visual and emotional journey shaped by color, movement, shape and form. Free of recognizable imagery, it opens a visceral, imaginative path of discovery, one that is quietly guided by the artist’s experiences.
Her latest series of work, created at her studio in Bend, draws from her early life, growing up in northeastern Oregon as part of the third generation of a family-run flower shop. Using encaustic paint, a beeswax-based paint mixed with pigments, she encases dried floral matter into the works, exploring themes that have always been integral to her process: how we locate and feel grief in the body.
That was also the driving force behind her previous project, a collection of paintings for the solo exhibition, “At the Altar of My Own Love,” held in May at after / time, an artist-run gallery and experimental curatorial platform in Portland. “Themes were centered around grief and love and cycles of the ends of friendships and relationships … chapters in our lives as we move forward into new spaces,” said Bodfish.
She’s carrying that same emotive tonality into her new work. “It’s really important to me to have those different layers present in the pieces,” she said. She seeks to create artwork offering places of solace. Following intuition and instinct, she draws on her own experiences, particularly moments of deep grief juxtaposed with moments of joy.
Those included the death of two relatives with whom she was close: her grandmother, 10 days before she graduated from high school with honors, and her great uncle, just before she was going to study abroad in London for a summer. She went on to complete a dual master of fine arts in visual studies and a master of arts in critical studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Three days before her graduation, her partner abruptly ended their relationship.
“I had these big moments of grief accompanied by accomplishment, where it was this severing of a past life,” she said. “The ending of my time in my hometown, me going off to a new place for the first time and really stepping fully into myself, then finally completing my education after seven years and having this abrupt end to a relationship that had been there with me through all of it. So, the past lives that I reference [in the work] are in relation to those different versions of myself that I’ve been through in these major chapters of my life,” she said.
A new chapter in Central Oregon brought connection. She moved to Bend three years ago to teach art history and studio art at OSU-Cascades. In the summer of 2023, she was awarded an artist residency at the Scalehouse Gallery downtown.
“I had a studio space with them for about six months, and that really allowed me to be connected more to the arts community here and our faculty at both colleges,” said Bodfish, who now also teaches painting at Central Oregon Community College. “They’re wonderful people and are so passionate about the work that they do, so I feel incredibly supported in the space that I’ve been in,” she added.
Bodfish’s work continues to evolve, rooted in both loss and renewal. By embedding dried flowers in her work, she reflects on life’s impermanence—an ephemerality she finds deeply beautiful, and one that reminds her, and us, to always seek moments of presence. See more of Erin Bodfish’s art at erinbodfishart.com.
