My work often starts with something abstract – like a wayward emotion, a memory, or a hard to remember dream. Narrative is important to my work as an impetus, but I am always seeking places to depart from intentions, combine visual languages, and find something new or surprising. I am interested in the middle of things, facts into fiction, real into imagination, observation into abstraction, painting into drawing, childhood into growing up. My work often emerges out of trial, error, and engagement with materials and color. I employ the logic of daydreams and let the materiality of the work play a part in what happens next in hopes of giving language to things that are hard to talk about in other ways – things like shame, joy, love, and loss. 

Treeforms are a play on Colorforms, the childhood toy with plastic shapes and colors that can be moved around to form pictures and stories. There is a loose play with the idea of a treehouse forming around trees that are also in flux. Everything is in a state of moving, hiding, shifting, dancing, and growing. I am interested in the romance of a treehouse as an ideal, built out of love, as a place that can be a shelter or permission to dream. It is a structure that is both an interior and exterior, and I use it as a metaphor for shame, but also for imagination. Treehouses feel rooted in childhood, slightly magical, built around a tree, which is simultaneously alive and rooted. And for the most part, you can’t live there. There is no running water, no heat, often no walls or permanent protection. There is always a time where you have to come down. – Erin Koch Smith