Erin Jane Nelson’s practice is grounded in photography sourced from her personal archive of found and original images. She often works serially, with each project delving into new conceptual frameworks as far ranging as the cultural anxiety around climate change, the sentience of octopuses, and the science fiction of our present moment. Raised in the American South and based in Atlanta, Nelson travels throughout the region to photograph her surroundings and lived experiences. Nelson’s work merges photographic elements onto unexpected support structures, including fabric, hand-crafted quilts, panels, and ceramic inspired from distinctly Southern craft objects such as memory jars, improvisational quilts, and sailor’s valentines. Building upon feminist and queer artists of the 1970’s and 80’s, Nelson honors these underappreciated modes of production by bringing them into the realm of contemporary art.

For Art Basel, Nelson’s newest body of work addresses a uniquely personal subject: her fraught relationship with her mother. Although traces of her mother’s creative influence have seeped into the artist’s practice in varying forms, this body of work is Nelson’s first attempt to contend with her mother’s struggle with alcoholism and mental health and how their dynamic has challenged Nelson’s own gender identity and relationship to substance. Set within a yellow painted booth, a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Nelson presents a series of ceramic vessels and fabric-wrapped panel works that build upon themes of personal memory, documentation, and the nuances of intergenerational relationships.

Large scale, lopsided vessels embedded with photographs and personal ephemera, convey a similar visual language to Nelson’s previous wall-based ceramic works. These examples, however, are inspired by a giant vase made by the artist’s mother in the 1970s, which is the first art object that Nelson loved. For her, this sculpture’s highly articulated, but collapsed and crudely constructed shape has come to symbolize elements of her mother’s life. Created during the ascendance of the women’s movement in the United States, its imperfections also serve as a reminder of the shortcomings of women’s liberation, which have become increasingly evident in our present socio-political context.

The accompanying upholstered panels derive their peculiar shapes from the silhouettes of the Rorscharch test, referencing traditional, and perhaps questionable, methods of psychological testing and diagnosis. Their forms appear shield-like, at once soft and protective. Nelson wraps her panels with colorful found textiles, and fabric printed with the artists own original images. Materials are further manipulated through a process of dying and bleaching – a cathartic action that allows Nelson to simultaneously destroy, repurpose, and come to terms with the often-difficult personal connotations of her materials. Printed photographs are affixed to the panel’s surfaces, including many “angsty” self-portraits the artist made during her adolescence, clippings from Ms., a 70s-era feminist magazine, reproductions of Rajneeshee women enthralled in orgasmic states while engaging in cult practices, and recent portraits of the artist’s mother, among others. Her compulsive mixing of signs opens her work to multitudinous interpretations, imbuing each piece with a propensity for discovery.

In her physical and conceptual layering, Nelson collapses narratives from both her and her mother’s lives, suspending their intertwined experiences within a shared ground. While women with addictions and mental illness are often criminalized or stigmatized, Nelson’s homages to her mother’s struggles are meant to engender empathy and complexity in a moment when addiction among women in the United States is on the rise and often passed from one generation to the next. Through this lens of her own experience, Nelson begins to uncover the dark complexities of addiction and alienation in familial relationships. In Maggie Nelson’s, The Argonauts, she quotes Judith Butler:

“One of the gifts of recognizing oneself in thrall to a substance is the perforation of such subterfuge. In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching. Most people decide at some point that it is better…to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. I’m glad not to be there right now, but I’m also glad to have been there, to know how it is.”*

Erin Jane Nelson lives and works in Atlanta, GA. In 2011 she received her BFA from The Cooper Union. Nelson has a current solo exhibition at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and recent solo presentations at Document Gallery, Chicago and Hester, New York. Her work is currently featured in a two-person exhibition with Joshua Nathanson at Van Doren Waxter, New York and has recently been included in exhibitions at Capital Gallery, San Francisco, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which recently acquired the artist’s work.

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*Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2016.