Erin Crouch
(b. 1984, Djilang/Geelong, Victoria. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)

Erin Crouch is a visual artist who works with the moving image to create video and film installations. Her works often tease out surface tensions built up in history, such as agricultural practices on settled land in Australia. Her works explore the way these histories exist presently and manifest in individual and collective psyches.

Clean Up Efforts Underway, 2019, comprises found footage from television archives and DIY YouTube Channels, alongside landscape scenes filmed on settled farming land in contemporary Victoria. Water is a common and linking element that guides this meandering visual dreamscape and is both a uniting and dividing trope in the video. Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe appears to a dreamer in a discourse around spirituality while natural running streams are contrasted with the chemical interventions of human-made pools. Moving fluidly itself, the video charts multiple coinciding narratives reflecting the dreamer’s subconscious state.

Crouch’s solo exhibitions and screenings include My Father My Father, Friday Night, Savage Garden, Melbourne (2021); Clean Up Efforts Underway, recess (2019); Then Daddy Takes His Place in an Australian Landscape, The Treasury Theatre, Melbourne (2018); and Under The Jumpers, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne (2017). Selected group exhibitions include False Feeling, Constance Artist-Run Initiative, Tasmania (2019); Black Box: recess, Kings Artist-Run Initiative, Melbourne (2019); THERE IS A PAIN – SO UTTER, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2018); and Disinterment, MADA Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne (2017). Crouch holds a Masters degree (Fine Art Research) from Monash University (2018).

Clean Up Efforts Underway appeared in Community Hall on 15–21 May 2023.

Film credits
Clean Up Efforts Underway, 2019, HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 16 sec, © Erin Crouch