CONNIE MICHELE MOREY

1. The Ground that Mends, 2021, Performance, 30 second stop-motion video, Dimensions: variable.

2. Resuscitation, 2021-2022, Oliphant Clearcut (Vancouver Island, BC) Rock with blast hole, wool. 15”x15”x12”. 3. Harvest, 2021. Performative intervention, fabric on stump. 4. The Mending Ground, 2021, Collaborative Community Installation, Dimensions: variable.

STATEMENT

Working on The Mending Ground at Eden Grove on unceded Pacheedaht territory is an act of standing with Old Growth forests, while questioning how to mend our relationships with the earth and each other. The Mending Ground (Part 1) consists of an installation of fifty tenderly and creatively stitched art-socks from makers and menders across Turtle Island installed in the Ancient Forest of Eden Grove. Part 2 consists of quiet labour performances (Harvest and Gather) and a stop-motion video titled The Ground that Mends. While spending time with the thousand year old sentient Trees in Eden Grove, I've been reflecting on Elder Bill Jones and Hereditary Chief Victor Peter's modeling of respectful relations while considering Anishinaabe biologist and matriarch Robin Wall Kimmerer's advocacy for "The Honourable Harvest". Through this lens, The Mending Ground questions how we might harvest, gather and labour while looking to the forest as a model for revisioning systemic colonial ideologies of 'resource' commodification and economic growth.

BIOGRAPHY

Connie Michele Morey's studio practice explores the experience of home as ecological interdependence. Through site-specific performance, and participatory sculptures documented through photography and video, her work questions the relationships between ecology, displacement and belonging. Connie's studio practice is influenced by childhood experiences living rurally off the land, while being surrounded by family traditions of masonry, construction and textiles. Her family history co-mingles settler and Indigenous identities (Scottish, Scandinavian and Anishinaabe), and her studies in sculpture, ecology, philosophy and decolonial studies have impacted her interest in the politics of displacement. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Lethbridge, an M.Ed. in Art Education and a Studio-Based PhD from the University of Victoria. She currently lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Xwsepsum (Esquimalt) and Lkwungen (Songhees) Peoples where she also teaches Drawing, Sculpture, and Community Art at the University of Victoria and Camosun College.