Publications: Living and Working

Institute 193 is pleased to present Living and Working, a monograph on the work of artist Erin Jane Nelson.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Living and Working traces ten years of artist Erin Jane Nelson’s evolving practice in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Moving from fabric collages to wall-hanging ceramics to analogue photography using cameras of her own making, Nelson has investigated the relationship between the watery landscapes of the American Southeast and the psychological and political structures of our contemporary world.

Nelson’s practice gently applies pressure to the traditional boundaries of fine art, offering an imaginative, open-ended response to ecological anxiety. She draws upon a lineage of feminist practices, infusing her collaged quilts and amoeba-like ceramics with visual languages indebted to various aesthetics traditionally excluded from fine art––vernacular craft forms of the South, science fiction, and the overtly feminine and personal. Living and Working mirrors this blurring of boundaries by including candid photographs, diaristic writing, and Nelson’s own fiction alongside traditional critical essays and full-color documentation of her work.

Institute 193/Abroms Engel Institute for the Visual Arts
ISBN 9798995866305
Designed by Brette Richmond. With text by Hannah Spears, Elisabeth Sherman, Kelsie Conley, Erin Jane Nelson, and Margaret Kross
Paperback, 136 pages
149 color images / 183 b+w images
7x10 inches