This is the first set in a continuing series that examines the shapes of the nation’s most severely gerrymandered districts.  The ink is iron gall; the paper is made from Sea Isle Cotton mens’ dress shirts.  Sea Isle Cotton was most successfully grown in the Sea Islands off the Carolina coasts and Georgia.  Most notably on Hilton Head Island Plantation, which during the Civil War was deserted by plantation owners leaving the crops in the care of the formerly enslaved.  SIC was produced successfully there until a great boll weevil infestation wiped out all the crops.  It is now primarily grown in the West Indies.  

The larger project on gerrymandering examines the redrawing of district lines from their ratification to present day.  I oxidize the iron gall ink of lines that have been erased and redrawn.  I began with the southern states and those formerly subject to the Voting Rights Act for the series called Fault Lines.