Catherine Erb’s luminous photo-based works capture a spirit of the sublime in everyday life. Her practice is a meditative process, exploring and revealing the radiance of the present moment and the complexities of relationships among people, places, things, as well as things unseen. Her studies of clouds transcend space and time with luscious translucence, while her portraits of everyday objects are instilled with the ineffable longing of memory. Her explorations of nature are sensitive and full, leaving the viewer with a profound sense of peace. Merging photography with painting, she has developed a method to create surfaces that feel both vulnerable and complex. Beginning with an image printed on watercolor paper, Erb mounts her photographs on birch panel, subtlety manipulating them with soft pigments and numerous layers of tinted wax. Overall, her unique perception merges reality with imagination, connects the physical and the divine, and shares a deep reverence of memory as well as the present moment.

Catherine Erb is a native Memphian. Her fascination with photography began in the late 80s when she had unlimited access to a camera and darkroom. After high school, she moved to Europe to work with photographers for several years before returning to Memphis. She continued to use her camera as tool for visual journaling, and after discovering a digital darkroom, she began exploring alternative printing formats to create more extensive, conceptual bodies of work. She has had solo exhibitions in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Austin, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; and Greenwich, Connecticut. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, The New Southern, and Nashville Arts Magazine.