The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University will open an exhibition Thursday by three artists tackling a nautical theme in felt cutouts, charcoal drawings and motorized sculptures.

Wilson Museum director Amy Moorefield describes “Echo Sounding: Liz Miller, Younseal Eum, Huguette Despault May” as a three-part show about “how contemporary artists are looking at our relationship to marine life and to nautical elements and transforming them into works of art.”

Minnesota-based artist Liz Miller creates large sculptures using pieces of stiffened felt. The individual pieces are usually cut in shapes that reflect the theme of the sculpture.

Miller is creating an installation in the form of an ocean wave that will fill the museum’s largest gallery, to be called “Deep Six (Crimson).” The red pieces it’s made from recall jellyfish and other sea creatures.

Previous examples of Miller’s style include “Ballistic Boondoggle,” a large assembly shown last year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Gallery that resembled an immense cobweb, but with individual pieces cut in the shapes of various firearms.

A Korean artist who’s previously resided in Blacksburg and Richmond, Younseal Eum creates delicate kinetic sculptures with motorized parts. Eum currently works for a robotic toy company in South Korea.

Moorefield said she first encountered Eum’s work in 2011 at the William King Museum in Abingdon. Eum’s piece in that show was a glass partially filled with water etched with a sailing ship. A motorized wire device attached to the glass caused it to rock so that the water inside mimicked the motion of waves.

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