The Hands: to mould mythologies with bare flesh
A conversation with Erin Mison
Erin Mison, 31, is an Illawarra-based artist, lecturer and PhD candidate in psychology.
Her research focuses on schizotopy, which Erin describes as having “all the same hallmarks [as schizophrenia], just not as significant as you’d see in someone who gets a diagnosis”. Her work considers the role of parenting and different bullying categorisations in the onset of psychotic experiences in schizotopy.
She tells me she thought she was going to be a defense attorney, that’s why she went into psychology. She didn’t realise, at the time, that what she wanted was less clinical, it was researched focused.
But Erin says it wasn’t a matter of deciding to shift gears.
She says, “I always knew what I wanted. I just didn't have the right language about what it looked like.”
And we see this in her work as an artist, Erin is invested in exploring the underbelly of darkness in humanity, not to judge, but to understand.
In 2020, Erin’s friends asked her to join a group show at Project Contemporary ArtSpace.
“I put in some paintings, and they all sold. Which doesn’t mean a lot because it was mostly family and friends. But it means a lot to me.”
Though Erin says she doesn’t have any formal training in art, she grew up with a lot of creative friends who all did self-funded shows.
Being recognised by her friends as someone who could be an artist, spurred a new energy with Erin.
She wanted to make art and make her art be seen.
So, what was next?
Tufting.
Erin found tufting through TikTok, before the boom. “Not to be a gatekeeper or cringe about it, but I did see it on TikTok before the revolution.
“I know that for a fact because I’m the one who started the subreddit. Now we’re 40,000 members strong.”
Erin says that, in part, her tapestries or “textile objects” that she makes from tufting were informed by her appreciation for a literary, visual medium - comics.
“I'm certainly not a big comic-head. But the ones that I've always kind of been attracted to are deep storytelling ones like Maus and Watchmen.
“I do like seeing visual storytelling. Putting [tapestries] together almost like a panel, that appeals to me because the conceptual nature of my art mine, as opposed, to say, pure abstraction or pure expressionism.”
Erin says, “I just wanted to make these dumb rugs.”
She reveled in the playfulness of what she was creating.
“I was the only person on the planet making tufted tits.”
But Erin, like in her work as an academic, is motivated to look at art as a canvas to explore. It wasn’t just “tufted tits”
It was physical. “It’s blood, sweat, and tears, in a way,” she says. “I get a lot of pain in my hand and my back. You’re literally pouring your body into it.”
“It was so tactile, so personal, there was this very guttural element to it.”
“A lot of the work felt hard to make, so the concepts became harder. I leant into those knee jerk feelings that came from pain, but it was also very freeing and liberating.”
But being an artist was more than freeing for Erin, beginning tufting was a lightbulb moment.
I ask her if this period in her life is when she really fell in love with art.
She reacts with her body.
“Goosebumps,” she tells me.
For Erin, she says there is nothing she’d rather do than be an artist.
Since that first show with friends in 2020, Erin been featured in showings across New South Wales and Victoria. In 2022, Erin had her first solo exhibition A Comprehensive Guide to Chicken Lips at Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne.
The year that followed was a “whirlwind”. Local gallery Egg and Dart reached out to Erin, first to be involved in their 2022 Christmas show and soon it would be much more. This was a dream that Erin had wished for but didn’t expect would appear for her the way that it had.
“In my opinion, and I know it’s biased but Egg and Dart have had quite an impressive catalogue of people in their stables over the years.”
She said she was taken aback by the casualness of those first exchanged emails with Aaron (founder) and Elisa (gallery director).
Yet, it was also this dynamic that had eased Erin and made clear to her how well they would gel together.
Egg and Dart had been on a pedestal for Erin but it was a natural fit for her.
In 2023, Erin worked with Egg and Dart for the Melbourne Spring 1883 Art Fair, her own solo show Swimming In Strange Waters and the gallery’s yearly Christmas show.
Erin is a represented artist with Egg and Dart and most recently she was in the group show Form over Fallacy alongside Anna Fiedler, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson and Ruby Brown. The show ran from 22 March - 12 April, 2025.
But it is the first phone call from Egg and Dart, that was the most memorable to the artist.
“To this day, that was the funnest and most exhilarating call I’ve ever had. Even compared to anything I could wildly imagine with my research career, I just get so much more excited about the art.”
New Mythologies.
Perhaps, it can be said that art is at the intersection of everything that is important to Erin.
No call regarding her research career could be as satisfying to her because she finds what she needs in art.
The kind of deep inquisition and commitment to following the through-lines in data, history and stories necessary in research, and a fixture in Erin’s worldview, bleeds into her art practice.
But in 2024 a trip to Greece tugged the entwined theads of Erin’s worldview and art practice towards a new direction.
“There was something about going to Greece, the mythology, the storytelling, their version of the gods, which was very appealing to me.”
The mythologies that we around the unanswered terrains of truth is very “human”, Erin says.
“We put masks on what we don't know and we bring them into our lives.
That version of a relationship with a faith makes sense to me.”
But what about the versions of these stories, and of course, you could argue these frameworks of reality, that have been left unspoken for and remain obscured?
On a tour in Knossos, Crete, Erin says that the guide from the Greek Historical Association had unlocked a rabbit hole for her to climb into.
“He told us that we don't know anything about the Minoans because they speak a version of ancient Greek that we haven't actually deciphered.
“So we're only going off what the Greeks say about when they took over this area and what's on the frescoes.”
She was struck then by the Greek mythology of the imprisoned Minatour - how could she use her art to tell the Minatour’s story?
When Erin returned to Australia she was inspired with a new artistic narrative and so, she linked in with Glenn Barkley, a ceramicist based in Sydney/Berry.
In Crete, Erin realised new capacities for her art.
“There’s so much ceramics in Ancient Greece and visual storytelling is everything to me.”
Erin soon found that she loved the medium of ceramics and only a few months after she created her first ceramic piece it was featured in the 2024 Egg and Dart Christmas show, alongside the Erin’s trademark tapestries.
Erin’s work is impressed with intentions to look into misinterpretations and the falsity of the ‘face value’.
Within that, it seems that there is a part to be played the observer of art, too.
Meaning/Making.
The dark side of intimacy and the self that were webs of her tapestry art, became a clay that she could mould into a new way of considering the undesirable, shadowed aspects of our world.
A particularly striking work by Erin is a tapestry from 2023 - ‘I Smile and I Sip My Opium Tea.’
Erin makes comment on the difference between the men and women who viewed this artwork.
The men she had shown in life saw a kiss and loving embrace but the women knew that the woman in the tapestry was passed out.
Misunderstandings, Materials and Messages.
In the work that evokes religious imagery, Erin says that she is unsure of how others understand her relationship to faith.
“That is a misunderstanding that I don’t have an answer to.”
But perhaps answers of certainty are unrealistic.
In her latest group show, Erin’s mythological influence is clear.
Coming of age is difficult enough without the added complexity of being worshiped as a god and fictionalized as a monster. The strangeness of imagining this juvenile god-monster is how familiar he feels, that like these mythological characters we have to navigate life with our labels walking into a room before we even step foot in it. These works are a collection of adoration artifacts, love letters to those very select people who see us truly through the noise. Each work in this collection reflect a clash of material and message, visual and realized examples of gratitude and love for someone that holds out their hand to steady a shaky connection to our own sense of identity.
Erin’s work, academic and artistic, has always roamed into spaces of discomfort - a challenge to confront.
And of course there to more at play here than what I am taking a moment to question, but still, I wonder how much shame is harboured within us when we close our eyes to the uncomfortable, the unknown, the shades of grey and the edges that are rough?
Erin takes issue with oversimplifications and dichotomous thinking, we are worthy of being seen as more than one thing or another, and so is her art.
“I’m accepting of myself and I’m accepting of the world.
I think that people are net-capable of being wonderful.”
Wonder.
There is so much in this life that calls us to be moved by the wonderfulness embedded in each of us.
I remember seeing Erin’s work for the first time in 2022 at Teel Studios in Wollongong.
It was a tapestry - ‘And There Was A Girl From School’.
And I remember feeling like I saw something wonderful, too.
And just like Erin pulls from the world to make something that speaks to the nuances of her observations, we pull from our own miniature, though endlessly infinite, visions of the world into focus.
Perhaps we see a hug or perhaps we see something sinister, perhaps we see ourselves or perhaps we see a lover.
Maybe we see a pain point but maybe, we see within it something anew.
Whatever it may be, it might be worth our time to witness without shame but instead with acceptance.
‘And There Was A Girl From School’ called upon images of girlhood, desire and the politics of being ‘cool’ for me.
But most vividly I recall thinking, ‘wow, this feels like a TV Girl song.’
But hey, I’m not the only one making connections between art and music.
Erin says that is very human to create masks, mythologies, what have you, to understand the unknown.
I have to say, I think there is something very human in our ability to see art—all art (really all of life)—as some living, breathing organism.
And if you are perhaps curious to find out some of the sonic connective tissues in Erin’s organism of art and life, she has kindly provided us with the opportunity to indulge in our curiosity.
A playlist by Erin: For everything I have made with hands
You can follow Erin on Instagram @erinmison. If you are interested in buying an artwork, you can enquire with Egg & Dart here.