Soup (2022)
Dimensions: 8 x 8 x 10.5cm.
Medium: Glazed stoneware.
Erica Eyres is a Glasgow-based visual artist. Favouring an absurd aesthetic as the artist works between drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, installation and video, Eyres’ inter-disciplinary practice unpacks the complex ways in which social categories relating to womanhood, domesticity, heterosexuality, the amateur and the ordinary are constructed and embodied.
Her paintings and drawings mostly take their source material from vintage pornographic magazines. Caught somewhere between spontaneous fun and self-conscious affectation, the women in Eyres’ paintings resist any idea of eroticised passivity. Instead, the artist amplifies an uncanny sense of psychological interiority, subverting the expectations of shallow surface stimulation that define pornographic visual coding.
Ceramic reproductions of junk food items, culinary detritus, ashtrays, halloween props and inflatable dolls have come to play an increasingly large role in Eyre’s practice in recent years. Humorous, anti-climatic and yet strangely poignant, Eyres’ ceramics elevate the remnants of impulsive consumption. By preserving the material forms of cheap perishables and mass-produced novelties, Eyres locates the overlooked formal patterns in much of our contemporary consumer societies and elevates an aesthetic of disposability to the register of high culture.