Bio

Erin Breau-Barkley, (b. 1977, Toronto, Canada) resides in her hometown with her partner and two children. She studied at OCAD University, and later earned her BFA from NSCAD University in 2007. On her return to Toronto in 2008 she worked in Toronto’s not-for-profit sector, raising her two kids and putting her artistic endeavors on hold for a decade. Erin began painting again in 2019 at the start of the pandemic, out of necessity and compulsion, and has approached her re-entry to art making with fervour and commitment.

Artist Statement

Erin Breau-Barkley’s painting practice is informed by the shared memories and multi-generational photo archive of her family which she re-tells through oil painting. The images portrayed in her works reflect pieces of a larger story spanning many decades about home, place, identity, longing and time. They are short stories of desire, pride, loss, ownership, freedom, motherhood, sisterhood, and selfhood.

The elusiveness and ambiguity of the spectrum of memory is what Breau-Barkley aims to capture in her paintings - the space in between her own actual memory perception and personal ideologies about her life, and its connectedness within the larger socio-cultural memory in which we all exist. Her interest lies in the intersection between the variations of memory and in the re-articulation of images in an effort to harness the ethereal and familiar feelings of storytelling.

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