Erika Cann

Erika makes sculptures that playfully question what it means to live in precarious times and how we grapple with futures that are uncertain. She is interested in how wobbly structures, shoddy facades, absurd props, and residual traces can simultaneously explore states of the body, environment and society.

Her work draws, both materially and conceptually, on an interest in geology, rock climbing and the outdoors, as well as in ideas of deep-time, and the processes and cycles between bodies and geologies.

Found materials including discarded climbing wall panels, pipe insulation and tent poles are cobbled together to awkwardly linger and teeter. Tent windows and photographs slump and collapse into the architecture of the room, as if exhausted from holding themselves up.
Materials created to aid human functions might appear to find their own agency and walk off with it.

Soft Catch is a new body of work made during a residency which explores the thinness between things. A technique of proactive care used by belayers to protect their climber from the forces at play during a fall is widened to consider the interconnectedness of processes and cycles between various forms.

Sculptures, photographs and paintings overlap, collide and collapse with one another. Their thin skins allow for states of being to osmose between bodies and geologies, fragility and resilience, stability and collapse.

Erika Cann is an artist based in Exeter. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in 2021 and recently was a member of the 2025/26 Day School in Bristol.
Recent exhibitions include: Core Sample, Centrespace, Bristol; Bathing Places, 37 Looe St, Plymouth; The Devil’s Helix, Exeter Phoenix Platform Space; and The Self In Situ, Riva Studios, London.

Alongside her practice Erika is a gallery technician, curator and project facilitator. She is interested in developing artist-led opportunities in the South West and in 2024 established Traction Project Space, a window gallery and test space in Exeter.

www.erikacann.com @erikac_art