Erin J. Mathers is a Canadian artist whose work explores beauty, symbolism, mythology and the enduring power of the image.

Raised with Catholic roots, Mathers developed an early familiarity with a visual tradition in which beauty and symbolism were inseparable from questions of meaning, devotion and the sacred. Her later studies and travels broadened that inquiry considerably. She has studied Buddha Dharma, spent extended periods in India and Turkey, and lived in Iran, where her encounters with Persian culture and explorations of Sufi traditions took her from Tehran into the desert and Kurdistan.

These experiences inform an artistic practice concerned with the different ways human beings have attempted to give visible form to invisible things: devotion, courage, protection, transcendence, mortality and the sacred. Her influences range across classical and religious art, mythology, psychology, architecture, literature and the decorative arts.

Mathers' work moves between figurative painting, animals and symbolic subjects. Her Guardians collection brings together warriors, sacred feminine figures and animals as archetypes of strength and protection. Her current work is moving further into a painterly and historically resonant world of classical form, sacred and mythological imagery, symbolic nature and material splendour—gold and stone, celestial bodies, flowers and fruit, armour and ornament, and luminosity emerging from darkness.

Before establishing her studio practice, Mathers studied Cognitive Science and Psychology at the University of Toronto and later trained in applied psychology and counselling. This interdisciplinary background continues to inform her interest in archetype, perception, meaning and the psychological life of images.

She lives and works in Ottawa, Canada.