Erin Nicole Power

Erin Power — Artist Bio

Erin Power is a multidisciplinary artist from Washington State whose practice explores how humans shape, experience, and remember their environments. Working across painting, drawing, and works on paper, she combines direct observation with abstraction to investigate light, material, memory, and the shifting relationship between built and natural spaces. Her work is informed by close attention to the physical traces left by people, weather, time, and use.

Power earned a BA in Art Education and Art History from Western Washington University and an MAEd from Seattle Pacific University. She has built a parallel career as an artist and educator, teaching and mentoring young artists at the high school level in the United States and internationally. Her studio practice has been further developed through study at the Seattle Artist League, the Art Students League of New York, and the New York Studio School, as well as through artist residencies in southern France and Cappadocia, Türkiye.

Power's work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Museum of Northwest Art in Washington State, the Maryland House of Delegates in Annapolis, Maryland, and Les Printemps des Artistes in Istanbul. Her recent work has also been presented through exhibitions and gallery collaborations in Türkiye.

Artist Statement

At the core of my practice is an interest in how humans shape, experience, and remember their environments. I am drawn to places where different timescales meet—where ancient structures, natural processes, and contemporary built environments exist alongside one another. Through painting and drawing, I explore the physical traces of people, weather, time, and use, and how these traces shape our experience of place.

My process begins with direct observation. I walk, photograph, draw, collect materials, and study the physical characteristics of specific places. These observations become the foundation for studio work, where I layer, erase, rework, and translate them through painting, drawing, and works on paper. I move between precise geometric forms and fluid gestures, allowing the visual language of each body of work to emerge from the questions it investigates.

I am interested in the ways light, material, architecture, and natural processes continually reshape our surroundings. Through these shifting forms, I explore how places hold memory—and how our presence, in turn, leaves traces within them.