Finalist The 2019 Nillumbick Art Prize Monslavat Melbourne for Inhale/Exhale

Erika Gofton is an artist based in Melbourne Australia.

“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying.”
Louise Bourgeios

Erika Gofton’s work is fundamentally about empathy, anxiety and identity. About how we respond and feel for another and in turn how we then connect to ourselves. The ever-changing intersubjective relationship of mother and child is what she is  interested in exploring, in particular the liminal state of adolescence. The desire to hold on but let go at the same time makes you acutely aware of time shifting.

There exists an ever-present niggling anxiety, a heightened internal fear of being so close yet distant in the same breath, with the constant ‘What if” resounding in your head.The image acts as the conduit to share in that anxiety, discomfort, and uneasiness. To sit somewhat precariously between the beautiful and the ugly, the ambiguous and the lucid, the dark and the light, the absent and the present.

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