From the label text:

In Gabrielle Ione Hickmon’s new series of coil-built, burnished, and smoke-fired earthenware vessels, the interiors of the works are lined with natural clay slip gathered from a stream in Richmond, Virginia, which the artist processed to imbue a tangible connection to place.

Hickmon explores how water weathers and erodes the earth, forming clay over time, and how the environment—whether social, political or literal—similarly weathers and erodes the Black body. Erosion, more than just an act of violence, also serves as a crucible for transformation. Hickmon’s work contemplates what we can learn about Black life and the nature of freedom from the pathways, or desire lines, that water carves into the earth with perfect memory. The artist poses the question of how might following the desire lines of Black freedom dreams help us actualize them for the past, present, and future?