Erin Coughlin, EMERGE Artist in Residence in Print
- Kate Anker
- 51 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Interview with Katie Bonadies, February 2026
Erin Coughlin completed the EMERGE Artist in Residence program in print this January. She is a woodcut and relief printmaker who does a lot of sewing as well as some watercolor painting, drawing, and bookbinding.
Coughlin grew up wanting to be an artist and was introduced to printmaking at summer art camp in elementary school. She was also very interested in science and loved spending time outdoors. She pursued these interests independently, and it wasn't until Coughlin spent a summer living as a student steward on Allen Island studying marine science that she realized how science and art can play together. “I used drone images to remotely monitor the trash washing up on shore. The images were really cool top-down photos of rocky beaches with colorful trash all over it.” The color of the trash stood out from the gray driftwood piles. These colors and shapes found their way into Coughlin’s senior capstone, and she graduated from Colby College in 2023 with a double major in Environmental Science and Art with a concentration in printmaking.
Coughlin has a lot of experience doing field work and gathering data, and it’s important to her to work towards saving the environment she loves. Her environmental science background focused on chemistry and water quality of lakes and marine waters. She wants to continue to work in water science research and is currently looking for a job at a nonprofit organization, land trust, or other Maine conservation organization. In addition to her summer spent on Allen Island, Coughlin spent a summer volunteering as a general farm hand at Wolfe’s Neck Center in Freeport to weed, plant, and harvest their crops. “They had lost their grants for their apprenticeship program, but I still volunteered. They do a lot of research on how to build resilient farms and ecosystems and farm systems that aren’t contributing to climate change.” She also worked on an analytical chemistry project at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay studying the accumulation of pollutants in plankton and how the problem compounds as it reaches larger and larger organisms.
Coughlin explains the Gulf of Maine and the landscapes around it are very dynamic ecosystems, “If any one part is missing, things get out of balance very quickly and tend towards a monoculture.” If one species is missing, another will get really extreme. As lobstering moves north and disappears from areas, there will be an economic impact and a cultural impact as well. She thinks about what we’ve lost and considers how to show that in her work in a way that raises awareness. “It’s important not to get caught in the despair and focus on where we can save things and what to let go, and how to move on from here rather than focusing on what existed in the past.”
Making art is a good way for Coughlin to continue to get out and immerse herself in the environment. She loves to walk in the woods or on the beach, and when she sees a piece of trash, she takes a picture. It is very important for her to follow that initial spark of interest. “The way I see the world lends itself to the art I’m making. If I go for a walk, I see these cool patterns and images in nature, and it feels like the natural next step for me to turn it into art.” There are spots she returns to frequently like a rocky outcrop by crashing waves where she likes to sit and paint with watercolors.
When she’s back in the studio she reviews her images, paintings, and jetsam. Seeing them collectively is how she identifies what is at the front of her mind. She starts thinking about scale, how she wants to display the ideas, and the messages she wants to convey. She selects images that are most important to the message and transfers them onto woodblocks. Then she starts carving. The transformation that happens when an image is transferred onto a block reveals new ideas and patterns Coughlin hadn’t seen before. While in residence Coughlin has developed her theme of mangled lobster traps. “I’m exploring the way that all of the moving lines are intersecting and overlapping and making more of the series of jumbled debris piles, exploring different compositions and different types of wood.”
As a recent graduate, she’s thinking more critically about what she’s doing and what she wants her role to be as an artist. Her themes focus on big scale concepts like changing baselines in climate as well as smaller scale details like light as it changes throughout the day or weather throughout the seasons. The most important message in the work is a connection to place. Coughlin spent time as an outdoor education teacher in Wyoming, and she finds being connected to a place is important because it makes us more inclined to care for it. Helping people feel that connection and communicating what’s happening to the places we love–the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world–is what Coughlin hopes to gain from her environmental science research and coinciding art practice.
Art is Coughlin’s way of communicating intensely analytical scientific research to people who aren’t in those fields. “Art is a cool way to take the ideas I’m working through in science and research to create a compelling visual and get others to consider these ideas and see them in a new way.” Her recent practice has focused on how to tell narratives about conservation and climate change on the Maine coast. Her new work is an exploration and documenting of the changes in the environment over time.
Lately Coughlin’s been working with black and white in her prints as a means to be more intentional with consumption. She says limiting her color palette forces her to decide what she wants to be seen and what to leave out. It allows her to focus on texture and tiny details, rather than relying on color to make an image pop. One test print depicts ropes that washed up on shore that acted as practice carving different textures. Experimentation takes the pressure off of sitting down to make a finished piece of art and allows Coughlin to grow her instincts. She’s considering strategically working color back in when it’s important to the image.
Not only is Coughlin documenting the trash she finds on the shore, but she is also reusing it as much as she can in her own practice to create less waste. She came into the residency knowing she would have a heavy focus on recycled materials. She mainly uses plywood offcuts–repurposing things is another effort to limit the number of new materials she uses. Another way that Coughlin decreases her consumerism is by repurposing misprints by drawing all over them with marker or watercolor, which is a neat way for her to expand on her ideas. Sometimes Coughlin cuts up her prints and arranges them to make compositions of washed-up wood and buoys, which gives the work a sculptural dimension.
A zero-waste practice is still an element of what she does, but Coughlin realized she also needs to dive into technique and skill as a printmaker and be able to follow her intuition without the limitations of recycled materials. “It can be hard to develop a low-waste practice and progress as an artist. The amount of waste I create as an individual is so small.” Starting with the idea of no waste has helped her make thoughtful habits in her daily practice.
Coughlin’s aim is to bring people together to have conversations around conservation. She is currently looking for spaces to show her work and hopes to someday do a large-scale installation. She would love to collaborate on a research project or climate change initiative and work with others to do science communication through art. Building community is an important aspect to communicating Coughlin’s messages, not only for creating connection to place, but bringing awareness to how it affects us all.
Contact Coughlin through her website erin-coughlin.com and follow @erinec.art.