Erin Maurelli

Erin Maurelli is a Twin Cities based artist, working primarily in Printmaking and Book Arts. She is a Tamarind Certified Master Printer and collaborative printmaker. Her work is centered on aspects of the human body as the most amazing form of biotechnology. Maurelli draws parallels between a man-made physical world and the micro-functioning of our own bodies. Her work points out similarities found in nature, our own cellular structure, and human constructs. The machine is a metaphor for the body and vice versa. Maurelli has a strong interest in the science of prosthetics and the recent technological advances in this area of study. She dreams of a day when she might literally have an extra set of hands or eyes in the back of her head.

In her lifetime, Maurelli has experienced the failure of her own human machine. She has lived with the brokenness, lived through the healing, and has found beauty in its imperfection. Circles in the form of gears, pulleys, springs and other machine parts appear perfect and rigid. These same circular forms appear in complex patterns of nature; flowers, seed pods, spider webs, whirlpools, the cosmos. By combining these forms, Maurelli constructs mandalas of her own design. Within these structures she is able to find peace, and truly appreciate the unique functioning of her body.