Erin Collins: Disgusting Arousal
December 13th, 2023
By Liv Collins (I’m not related to Erin - I swear!)
Erin Collins is a multi-media artist pushing contemporary art's boundaries one hotdog at a time. Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this emerging artist creates photographs, oozing films, multi-sensory installations, and more – which explore our relationships between food, the body, desire, and disgust. Erin describes her practice as a “performance of disgusting arousal”, which is potentially the best artist statement I’ve ever heard. I originally came across Erin’s work in Newcastle University’s Fine Art Department, where we both studied our undergrads. Erin was a few years above me, and as a fresher, I was stunned by her art. It was polished, strange, captivating, disgusting, and incredible in equal measure. Now as artists on the other side of university, and out in the big bad world, I got in touch with Erin to find out more about her practice, her process, and what a performance of disgusting arousal means to her.
Wet Dreamz II - Image courtesy of the artist
Chatting over email, Erin comes across as a warm, intelligent, and deliciously sarcastic artist. We dive into conversation about her recent series, Shoo Collection. In this photo series, Erin displays a variety of single shoes, which are filled, stuffed, and seasoned with a variety of foods. Brightly lit against colourful backgrounds, these compositions are sometimes framed with text, and sometimes stand-alone, but they are always taken with the same expertise of an artist who knows what they’re doing.
A carefully arranged prawn cocktail salad sits inside a high-heeled shoe, and a dead shiny fish bulges out of a slider. In Shoo Collection, gross compositions are captured with the aesthetic gloss & saturated colour palettes suggestive of brand photography. I’m fascinated by the decisions Erin makes. Why shoes? Why food in shoes? What happens to the food afterward? And the shoes?
I’m a Geordie Girl - Image courtesy of the arist
Erin tells me that before starting this project, she reflected on the key themes in her work, and realised that they were: the body, food, texture, and the viewer. Using these as starting blocks for this new project, she chose to use shoes as “representatives of the body”. She adds that “the use of the shoe as a stand-in for the body was also to enable me to discuss and touch on ideas surrounding desire, fetishism, voyeurism… but then contrasted with disgusting foods and textures.” These photographs are layered - they simultaneously explore many ideas, from foot fetishes to the deconstruction of gender, there is much more to them than initially meets the eye.
I particularly like I’m a Geordie Girl (above). There’s a confidence to it, an underlying dark humour – which is exaggerated by the “stay classy” text which hangs above. And there’s something clever about taking two highly gendered forms and turning them on their head, a high-heel and a salad, putting them together to create something repellent and deliciously “unfeminine”. And against a Barbie pink background too, this subversion of gender tastes even sweeter.
“The use of the shoe as a stand-in for the body was also to enable me to discuss and touch on ideas surrounding desire, fetishism, voyeurism…”
Erin shares how she likes working with food because the viewer can immediately relate to it. We all have complex, ever-changing and deep relationships with food, which are rooted in memory, heritage, well-being, class, desire, and fear too. Erin plays with our innate connections with food and induces bodily reactions to her work. From disgust at imagining the feeling of sliding your foot into a shoe filled with cold pink prawns and lashings of mayonnaise, to the tingling satisfaction of pushing crisp chips down into the base of a shoe with your tiptoes – the dance between desire and disgust is ever present in her work. Erin also mentions how she was drawn to working with food because of its versatile and accessible nature. Unlike oil paints or stained glass, food doesn’t require the artist to have ‘formal’ skills to work it to its full potential. Although you don’t need training to stick your arms elbow-deep into spaghetti – Erin’s work is far from unskilled. The care that goes into each photograph is palpable.
Lust is Cheap - Image courtesy of the artist
Erin was recently involved in the exhibition Full House at Somers Gallery, London. This show brought together artists who share a relationship to neurodivergence and autism. She opened up about her own connection with neurodiversity and relates it to her joy of exploring textures within her art. “My work has always been linked to how art makes us feel in our bodies, being aware of ourselves. I’m an extremely tactile person, and this leaks into how I perceive the world.”
“I’m an extremely tactile person, and this leaks into how I perceive the world.”
She adds “I used to describe it as I look at something and I can feel within myself how that material feels without touching it, and that in itself is comforting to me. I don’t think I’m alone in that it is common. So I always wanted to elicit that feeling in my work.” An interesting observation she shares about the show is that although each of the artworks was very different, a common underlying thread between the artists, was that in their personal lives they seemed more reserved, whereas in their art they could get messy, break boundaries and fully unleash their creative impulses.
I’ve Got a Banging Body - Image courtesy of the artist
In Erin’s new series Wet Dreamz, the artist gets messy, mischievous – and wet. With syrupy fruit salad dripping down chests, and stray hot dog juice trailing down legs, this series explores fetishism, voyeurism, and the playfulness of sexual agency. Moving on from shoes, the artist uses handbags filled with food to explore these ideas. Seeing handbags as gendered cultural signifiers of wealth, style, class, fetish, and much more.
Erin shares how although she enjoys getting messy whilst putting the works together, she also likes the cleanness provided by capturing these scenes through a lens. “I love the filming process, getting dirty, but when I show this, I want it to be perfected and shiny… there is a separating nature of the camera lens, it pacifies us and keeps us clean. This allows us to engage more without fear.” In Wet Dreamz I, we can see an androgynous body dripping in pale-pink fruit syrup, yet we as the voyeur can look at this sticky scene and be separate from the mess, clean and dry. Erin also teased that her interest in the phenomenon of #foodporn (305 million hashtags on Instagram and counting), inspired this series.
The phallic hotdogs, drips of various fluids, and the suggestive placement of the food-filled handbags, all explore the social media obsession with food porn. On this topic, Erin also adds that everyone’s social media feeds today are, “all so perfect, bright colours, pornographic in a way.” An aesthetic which she emulates in Wet Dreamz – with the bright lighting, PVC, bubble gum pink backgrounds, and a soft-core aesthetic that visually appeases the gooey, sloshing imagery of the leaking handbags.
Wet Dreamz I - Image courtesy of the artist
“There is a separating nature of the camera lens, it pacifies us and keeps us clean.”
What I love about Erin’s work, is the unapologetic weirdness of it. We need strange art. I like how the text in her photographs pokes fun at the dull generic quotes that can be found on commodified artwork, designed for lackluster spaces (think “Live, Laugh, Love” energy). Over on Instagram, Erin sent me a quote by Ezra Croft which perfectly instills this ethos, “people need art in their houses. They don’t need Bed Bath and Beyond dentist-office art. They need weird stuff.”
Asking Erin what her plans are for 2024, she quipped that they were, “work out how to have a career, be a daughter, a partner, go to the gym, eat a balanced diet, get 8 hours sleep, stay sane then maybe how to make some art at the end of it.” Oh, the life of an emerging artist. It’s far from easy, but I’m so glad she’s sticking to the strange and forging her own path. Keep your eyes peeled for what she gets up to next, it’s going to be weird (and most certainly wonderful).
About Erin Collins
Based in Newcastle, Erin Collins’ practice works to explore the phenomenological boundaries of lens-based media, set within the margins of Surrealism and popular culture.
In quest of an embodied experience through cinematic and photographic tactility her subject matter centers on the disconcerting juxtapositions and discomfiting association of textures, objects, and the disjointed elusive body. Whilst a complementarity of humour and darkness, the uncanny and the familiar, of the seen and the implied, the sexualised and the repulsive runs throughout.