Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, graphic design, and book arts as his tools of inquiry. As an experimental visual thinker, he is not precious with his material. Instead, deeply curious about the power of photography and adjacent media, Erik takes advantage of their limitations. His work is connected by a sense of restlessness where he seeks out messy processes, delighting in how visual and language-based tools can be expressly matched to subject matter, causing a body of work to rise from the chaos. 

Many of his projects germinate from specific personal memories and grow into deeper discussions of place and identity, while other bodies of work are born from a general sense of wonder. Preferring intense focus within each project to a singular visual vocabulary across his practice, Erik is most curious about how to take risks with his subject matter, material, and expectations of mediums.

In 2022, he self-published Slate, the foundational prototype of an ongoing journey into how the act of seeing can deepen respect for the more-than-human world. What began as a simple act of recording marks, gestures, and other environmental curiosities evolved into a robust project about language. Slate introduced a guiding question: what emerges when we’re forced to start over? How can the environments we encounter so regularly become starting points for a new language – one based less on human need and more on something emergent? Slate is a unique manifestation of how multiple modes of visual communication – photography, semiotics, typography – can be employed to allow a reader space to get lost, while also providing clues to find themselves again (or anew).

Erik received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York. He currently holds a leadership position with the Kinship Photography Collective, leading workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking. In 2023, he launched Ramble Editions with Kristen Welles Bartley, as a collaborative vision for photobook publishing.

Contact

erik@erikmace.com