In Defense of Beauty is a suite of six drawings on 1970s and 1980s plantation ledger pages. Created with latex paint, pencil and, in some cases, gold leaf, depictions of distorted shadows cast by pieces of crochet meander across the neatly delineated rows and columns of the plantation pay list. Suggesting alternative landscapes or floating archipelagos, pieces of eighteenth and nineteenth century porcelain and clay sherds unearthed from former plantation fields infer a fragmented history replete with inconsistencies and fissures. 

and I bent down
listening to the land
and all I heard was tongueless whispering
as if some buried slave wanted to speak again 

—Martin Carter