Erin Sweeney (b. 2003) is a fiber artist and painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Sweeney was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2025.

“I am drawn to the forms we leave behind. Precious, dangerous, delicate and rough, fleshy and rock-like, growing, changing, and unrecognizable, shells bear witness to what once lived inside. I return to it again and again, not for its surface, but for what it contains and what it can no longer hold.

My materials vary. Oil, acrylic, wool, silk, each chosen for their ability to slip between states. I build textures that are at once tender and unsettling, compositions that seep, collapse. There is no singular body here, only traces. Orifices, vessels, thresholds. I am interested in what moves through them and what remains after.

The shell appears not as symbol but as echo. A home, briefly. A wound that has learned to harden. A soft archive of touch and time. Like desire, it doesn’t settle. It opens and closes. It remembers.”