Catherine Erb

Biography

Catherine Erb, is a self-taught fine-art photographer from Memphis. She began her fascination with photography in the late 80’s when she started using her camera as a way to visually journal. In 2003 she discovered the digital darkroom and began creating her own pigment prints as well as exploring alternative ways to print her work by adding encaustic wax and pigments to her images.

Erb’s luminous photo-based works capture a spirit of the sublime in everyday life. Her practice is a meditative process, exploring and revealing the radiance of the present moment and the complexities of relationships among people, places, things, as well as things unseen. Her studies of clouds transcend space and time with luscious translucence, while her portraits of everyday objects are instilled with the ineffable longing of memory. Her explorations of nature are sensitive and full, leaving the viewer with a profound sense of peace. Merging photography with painting, she has developed a method to create surfaces that feel both vulnerable and complex. Beginning with an image printed on watercolor paper, Erb mounts her photographs on birch panels, subtly manipulating them with soft pigments and numerous layers of tinted wax. Overall, her unique perception merges reality with imagination, connects the physical and the divine, and shares a deep reverence of memory as well as the present moment.

“I spend the most time searching for glimpses of a things divine essence and being still and present enough to capture those moments. There is a little break in time that occurs after something comes into my viewfinder but before I have had a chance to react or form a judgment: there is clarity in that interval of time and I try to shoot and capture that moment. When I am successful, the result is not just an image, but a feeling and reminder that magic always happens in the present.”