Erin Gould

I Long to be Arboreal

Video/Mixed media installation

Description: Two-channel video projection, found Kentucky coffee tree seed pods, woodblock print on Japanese Mulberry paper.

"As an artist invested in vegetal intelligence, much of my research practice involves time spent in intimacy with plant beings, closely observing their lives, and attempting to experience their place outside of capitalist notions of productivity and value.

I conduct extensive research from a wide variety of sources, from science journals to historical texts and literature. Simultaneously, I attempt to build intimate, reciprocal relationships with specific vegetal beings."

– Erin Gould

About the artist

Erin Gould

Erin Louise Gould is a multimedia artist and educator working primarily with sculpture, video, printmaking, and performance to investigate relations between human bodies and more-than-human bodies/ remembered presence and tangible absence/ capitalist ideologies and everyday manifestations of white supremacy. Much of their work investigates vegetal intelligence and autonomy, creating artwork that encourages others to form relationships with specific plant-beings. Gould currently works and resides on the occupied Indigenous lands now called Albuquerque, New Mexico, received their MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2020, and likes to think that the plants in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico have been just as formative as their academic education. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder fed Gould’s interest in how we perceive and live inside our bodies and how our bodies sometimes seem to live without us.