Katelyn Eichwald’s Sirens Have Their Own Story

A shell used as an ashtray. A pile of skulls titled Boy Problems. 

These are sirens as imagined by Chicago-based artist Katelyn Eichwald, represented by Cob Gallery in London. Her work starts with images we already recognize and uses them to explore memory and fantasy.

Her 2026 painting series Siren Song at Nina Johnson in Miami is one example. Rather than depicting sirens as dangerous beings luring sailors to their deaths, Eichwald imagined them as a girl gang, a sisterhood where men become fleeting objects of pleasure rather than the protagonists of the story. 

A painting of a man’s naked chest titled Dopamine reflects this.The inspiration for the sirens came from her 4-year-old daughter, Eve’s, love for mermaids and the fan culture surrounding the tv show, Heated Rivalry. 

“So many women I knew were loving the show and sharing it with each other, and it felt like we were experiencing the pleasure of male bodies outside of heterosexual politics or our own complicated relationships. It felt beautiful and healing for a lot of women.”

She envisioned her sirens experiencing male bodies in the same way and had a clear sense of who they were.

“Who hasn't had a menial job where workplace gossip is the only interesting part of your day? Who hasn't felt lust, or a wild need you can't explain? And then had a cigarette and made dinner, talked to a friend, cleaned up the bones of the sailors.”

The ideas explored in Siren Song connect to questions that appeared in Eichwald’s 2025 exhibit Like Lovers Do. While Siren Song imagines desire outside of romantic expectations, Like Lovers Do looked at the ways girls learn to imagine love through fantasy and the stories that shape how they understand desire.

The exhibit paired paintings of bralettes and lipstick kisses with mirrored collages assembled from Pinterest images and stills from 1980s and '90s teen romance films. Together they explored the images and symbols through which girls learn to daydream about romance before experiencing it. Despite the imagery, Eichwald did not view the series as being about adult sexuality or romance, but about a private space where girls could explore those feelings before they were shaped by outside expectations.

“It’s like the safety and the control of experiencing romance novels or watching the OC when I was in high school. I can experience all these things, I can feel all these feelings, but it’s entering my world and I have control over it and can make the narrative what I want it to be in my own head.”

Eichwald has returned to familiar myths, objects and cultural references as a way of exploring emotional experience. Although her imagery leans feminine, Eichwald uses those references to explore broader ideas of memory and longing. Storytelling remains the foundation of her practice, even as the imagery changes. Rather than telling complete stories, her work shows symbolic fragments that allow viewers to fill in the blanks, a process she compares to writing a sentence.

“When you’re reading a sentence, you’re getting bits of information in a certain order grammatically, and that shapes the meaning. When I’m making a painting, I am thinking about how the information is received: what you are going to see first, where your mind will go first, when you need to pull back, and when you need to gesture at a narrative.”

The art itself is only part of Eichwald's process. The practicalities of how she makes it are equally as important.

Her paintings are often not much larger than a postcard. In the past she has experimented with larger canvases, and isn't opposed to doing so again, but she continues to return to the smaller scale. On a practical level, smaller canvases are easier for her to make herself and allow her to reach a resolution more quickly "There's just something about that scale. It's the size of a book or my hand. It just has a strong relationship to me. And I like a big wall and a little painting, it feels natural."

She works from a home studio that was once her daughter’s bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the room is painted pale pink, something Eichwald jokingly describes as a “millennial thing.” It’s a small space, but one that works for this stage of her life.

Painting runs through the women in Eichwald's family. Her mother makes art, and both grandmothers made art. Today, she paints at the same desk that belonged to one of them.

"I grew up surrounded by quality art materials with the understanding that artmaking was a legitimate and natural way to spend my time. The actual making has always been very private for me, but that supportive environment gave me the space and resources to develop an internal life. The men didn't understand, but they did their best to accommodate."

While exhibiting internationally, Eichwald has continued working full-time in legal operations, a decision she says has given her both financial and mental stability that has allowed her art career to thrive.

That stability also allows her practice to fit around the realities of daily life.

"I don't have the kind of life where I can drive to a studio and work there consistently. I have to sneak in little pockets of time. It means the work has to be pretty fast and efficient. I don't have a lot of time for overthinking, which can sometimes be good for the work."

Making the work has to be pleasurable. She works seated at her grandmother's desk, often watching television or listening to music as she paints. 

For Eichwald, the work isn't about illustrating stories. It's about creating enough of one that someone else can step inside it. Once the art leaves her studio, she is comfortable giving up some control. She trusts galleries to install the work in ways that suit their space and audience. 

“I’m so close to it that sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going to resonate in what way with other people when it’s in my studio, it’s nice to have somebody I trust put them together, and often they fit in different ways then I would have expected” 

She has noticed that many collectors buy multiple works, arranging them into their own small narratives. Eichwald likens it to taking her story, finding an element that resonates, and creating their own world from it. She recalls one of her paintings of a raspberry bush in the dark that was purchased by a collector who had a raspberry bush in her yard that her dog loved and would always go to.

“The dog had recently passed away and the painting was coincidentally titled Waiting for You in the Garden. When the ladies at Cob told me that story, I was like oh my god, that’s symbolic of the ideal relationship I would want to have with someone buying it. That it resonates in that intimate way.”

Image Curtesy Cob Gallery & Nina Johnson Gallery