Erin Jane Nelson: Living and Working

May 21–September 26, 2026

Opening: Thursday, May 21, 5-7pm

AEIVA presents Living and Working, a survey exhibition of work by Erin Jane Nelson made between 2015 and 2025 while living outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Over this period, Nelson engaged in a sustained dialogue with the environment and ecology of the southeastern United States through work spanning photography, textiles, and ceramics. Regularly visiting sites like the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and barrier islands along the coast from Mississippi to southern Virginia, she created a body of work both personal and prophetic, memorializing precarious landscapes through the lens of her own lived experience.

In response to rising sea levels and the increasingly visible transformation of the earth’s oceans, Nelson focused her inquiry on aquatic ecosystems like the ocean, barrier islands, and the swamp. As mirror worlds where human maladaptation has preserved a different kind of order, these watery realms become spaces of possibility in Nelson’s work, sites for imagining alternate futures and ways of being in the present.

Borrowing as much from vernacular craft traditions as from science fiction, Nelson grounds her speculative worlds in lived experience and the material histories of the region. Her ceramics and collaged textiles contain artifacts from her personal archive, including found objects, photos, and ephemera. With an overtly femme, playfully juvenile visual language, her work conveys a range of emotions that speak to her experience growing up during a time of increasing climate anxiety. 

Made in the shadow of an uncertain ecological future while grappling with the limits of her own reproductive lifespan, Nelson’s work is preoccupied with the passage of time and the ways it can be experienced, marked, and held. It reflects the emotional experience of living day to day under the weight of current climate projections, holding both anxiety about what lies ahead and a tender nostalgia for the present as it unfolds. Rooted in the everyday, it finds a quiet persistence in the intimate labor of living and working in the midst of a changing planet.

Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, WI) lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. In 2011 she received her BFA from The Cooper Union. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Chapter NY, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; among others. Her work was included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the 2021 New Museum Triennial and has been included in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Moss Art Center, Virginia Tech; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, NLD; La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec; Deli Gallery, New York; Van Doren Waxter, New York; Capital Gallery, San Francisco; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Nelson is a recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

Image: Erin Jane Nelson, A Carnivorous Year, 2023. Pigment prints, sequins, and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware. Courtesy of the artist; Chapter NY, New York; and Document, Chicago and Lisbon.