Erin Middleton

Erin Middleton is a photographer and mixed media artist based in Milwaukie, Oregon. She holds a BFA (1985) and MFA (1987) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with an emphasis in photography, printmaking, and book arts. She completed graduate studies in Environmental Education Leadership at Portland State University (1997).

In the late 1990s, she worked with ecofeminist environmental artist Betsy Damon and co-founded a chapter of Keepers of the Water, a nonprofit focused on community-based water stewardship. She led community-designed stormwater remediation gardens at three Portland schools, work that established water, light, and the living world as the central lens through which she makes and understands her art.

After two decades of community-based environmental and arts work, she has returned to the studio full time.


Artist Statement

Chroma began as a study of shadows on a wall. It turned into a fascination with time and observation, and became a love affair with color and perception. And lastly, it became something I didn't anticipate: poignant evidence of a magnificent two-story rhododendron that was badly pruned, slowly died, and was cut down.

Light speaks to me as clearly as my own mother. It always has. A shadow on a wall can stop me in my tracks, take my breath away. I feel it in my body the way I feel birdsong. It tells me to pay attention. To slow down. To feel into this moment before it passes.

The shadows in this series begin as black and white and grey. What I'm capturing first is geometry: the precise, unrepeatable result of a thousand conditions conspiring together. These images exist for seconds, sometimes less. They will never occur again in exactly this way.

Then I bring the color. All of it invented. None of it from the original scene. I work with invented duotones, pushing saturation until something unexpected happens, until a third color begins to emerge from the relationship between the two. Chance is not a byproduct of my process. It is the methodology. I'm trying to create conditions where your body feels the image before your mind has a chance to name it.

Color, for me, is not description. It is conversation. A temporary agreement between what the world is offering and what the perceiver is capable of receiving.

Chroma is an ongoing series of more than 20 works.


https://erinmiddletonartist.com/