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About
Erica Bowers is a visual artist from Michigan. She received her BFA in Studio Art in 2025 from Michigan State University. Her works in oil painting explore the relationship between the self and the body. The artist examines the role of the female nude and the shaping of identity through the inhabitation of a body. By including elements of self-portraiture in exaggerated caricatures, she recognizes her experience in a body as individualized, relevant to where the intersection of identity falls under power structures.
By exploring the nude through fragmentation and mutilation of female forms, she examines the impact of violence on shaping the feminine self. In her work, she questions whether feminine identity is innate or rather a result of social behaviors and gender violence inflicted on AFAB bodies originating in girlhood. Through the loss of bodily autonomy, the identities of girls and women exist in a constant state of flux. She often depicts the female form headless as a method of critique, inquiring if female identity originates in the commodification of the physical body.
In her work, she is most interested in the deconstruction of boundaries as a means of pursuing self identification while holding occupancy in an AFAB body. Through an iterative process of configuration, she creates layered, fluid forms that convey metamorphosis of form by dissolving bodily boundaries. Deriving from an interest in collage, the artist manipulates and transfigures elements of the human form in order to portray her own relationship with womanhood as a continually evolving process. She allows disjointed bodily forms to merge and collapse into one another in order to establish motion relevant to the rapid evolution of self identity while navigating the socially inflicted ephemerality of the female body.