Senses of touch and senses of vision intertwine in the work of Erica Mahinay; through her mixed-media paintings and sculptures the immediacy of the artist’s tactical engagement is made evident, her work reminding us that sight is just one of the bodily senses that mutually contribute to a phenomenological understanding of the world.

Silk is a recurrent substrate for Mahinay’s paintings, in works that acknowledge, through their translucency, their whole selves – front, back, inside, out. In certain paintings, she will begin on one side of the silk and then reverse it; in others, she may sew silk gloves into the painting, as if literalizing her own touch. In very many of Mahinay’s paintings, whether on silk or linen, she will apply paint or pigment with her fingers, leaving scale-like dabs or sinuous smears.

In her ceramic sculptures, fingermarks will inflect forms attesting a meeting of artist and her subject.

Throughout Mahinay’s work, there is a sense both of the artist wielding materials until the painting has been found, and of materials finding their own form, as when she allows rivulets of poured paint to make their way across a tilted canvas. Such effects introduce a further dimension to her painting: that of time, folded into a single work, halted in stillness. It is up to the viewer, through slow and patient looking, to set it in motion once again.

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