Erin Chumley Scobey


Erin Chumley Scobey
Visual Artist and Art Educator
Nashville, Tennessee
Artist Statement
My work spans painting and textile-based mixed media, incorporating fabric, felt, thread, and found objects to build layered, tactile surfaces. Across mediums, I construct vivid, immersive worlds often saturated in pinks and lush color blurring the boundaries between fantasy, memory, and emotional landscape. These environments draw from the visual language of 1990s girlhood ephemera and the imagined jungles of early modern painting, merging playful excess with an uncanny sense of unease.
At the core of my practice is an ongoing exploration of motherhood and transformation. I make work about pregnancy, birth, and the physical and emotional shifts that accompany raising children. As a mother of two sons with distinctly different expressions of masculinity, I examine how identity, gender, and vulnerability are performed, protected, and misunderstood from childhood onward. These observations become symbolic rather than literal, embedded in pattern, color, and composition.
While my work appears exuberant and celebratory on the surface, it is underpinned by darker themes of processing childhood trauma and inherited emotional histories. Through accumulation, softness, and saturation, I use beauty as both a shield and an entry point creating spaces where tenderness, excess, and discomfort coexist.


