Erin Jane Nelson, Daufuskie Muscat, 2018

Narrator: The title of this work, Daufuskie Muscat, refers to a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. Traditionally, Daufuskie had been inhabited by the Gullah Geechee people, who descended from Indigenous and freed enslaved people. In recent decades, they have been pushed out by the tourist industry. The work is a meditation on such displacements, whether driven by profit or climate change. 

Erin Jane Nelson: I became interested in barrier islands in part because, after several years of back-to-back, brutal hurricane seasons, I just kept hearing about all of these regions that were being decimated.

Narrator: Erin Jane Nelson. 

Erin Jane Nelson: And a lot of times the places that were falling victim to this weather were also kind of the places where a lot of Southern history, good and bad, had been contained and either acknowledged or not acknowledged.

Throughout the work, I use sort of nautical elements like the sand dollar in this piece and found wood from the beaches to really create a time capsule of the place. And then because barrier islands are this strange ecological phenomenon that protects the mainland, they have this really interesting shape to them. And that geographical shape is really partly what inspires the ceramic forms, which are somewhat oblong and kind of unspecific. And then also by encasing the works in resin, which I think appears to look like water, you get the sense of these places being wet or flooded, and that's something I really like about making this work.