ERIN JANE NELSON

Early years and Background

Raised in the American South, Erin Jane Nelson has described her attachment to the region as both formative and fraught, shaping the way she thinks about landscape, history, and belonging. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in New York in 2011, a context that consolidated her interest in photography and experimental image-making.

After graduating, Nelson spent time in New Mexico and California, where she immersed herself in ceramics, quilting, and weaving, gravitating toward so-called craft processes that would become central to her work. She later based her practice in Atlanta, balancing her studio work with roles in curating photography and folk and self-taught art, and co-founding the project space Species in 2016.

Nelson now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while continuing to draw on the cultures, ecosystems, and politics of the American South as a major locus for her artworks.

Erin Jane Nelson Artworks

Erin Jane Nelson’s artworks begin with a personal archive of found and original photographs, which she prints onto supports including quilted textiles, silk, hand-sewn panels, and ceramic forms. Through layered construction and collage, she stages speculative worlds that hold together humour, unease, and grief in response to climate crisis and social change.

Ecologies, craft, and climate

Erin Jane Nelson frequently addresses the degradation of specific ecosystems, especially coastal wetlands and Southern barrier islands, fusing local histories with imagined marine life and science-fiction narratives. Multidisciplinary works combine photography with quilting, embroidery, and ceramics, sometimes rendering creatures or micro-organisms whose fragile bodies register warming seas, pollution, and interspecies entanglement.

Her use of craft traditions—dyed and bleached fabrics, hand-pieced quilts, hand-built clay—connects domestic labour and vernacular making with larger environmental and economic systems. The resulting objects often appear eroded, burned, or punctured, foregrounding destruction as both a formal strategy and a way to process anxiety about ecological futures.

Intimacy, psychology, and narrative

Alongside environmental themes, Nelson has developed bodies of work that explore formative relationships, maternal influence, and the psychological textures of care and addiction. In one series presented at Art Basel with Chapter NY, she built upholstered panels from Rorschach-like silhouettes, wrapping them in found fabrics and photographic prints to evoke testing, diagnosis, and intergenerational trauma.

Throughout her practice, Nelson’s photographic surfaces are often partially obscured or disrupted, complicating legibility and inviting viewers to navigate overlapping narratives. This layering of images, textures, and references enables her to hold together subjectivity, distance, sympathy, and exclusion without resolving their tensions.

Erin Jane Nelson Exhibitions and Recognition

Nelson has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta Contemporary, Chapter NY, New York, DOCUMENT, Chicago, and other project spaces in the United States and Europe. Her work has featured in major group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the New Museum Triennial, New York, among others.

In 2023, Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, recognising the ambition of her materially inventive approach to contemporary art and her sustained engagement with climate and social realities. Her work is held in institutional and private collections, including European collections such as Fondation Villa Datris, which emphasise her contribution to contemporary sculpture informed by ecological thinking.

Selected exhibitions

• Solo exhibitions (selection): Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Chapter NY, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; Ommu, Athens (for Going for Soup); and other gallery presentations in the United States and Europe.
• Group exhibitions (selection): 2021 New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec; and additional shows at Deli Gallery, Van Doren Waxter, and Capital Gallery.

Erin Jane Nelson Awards and honours

• Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, 2023

Erin Jane Nelson FAQs

Ocula | 2026