Connie Michele Morey
Exhibition Statement
Threadbare is a body of work that explores the effects of colonial industries on interspecies displacement and ecological loss through stitchwork, embroidery, sculpture, photography, stop-motion, and performance. The project began in the summer of 2021 in an area referred to as the Deadman Valley, in British Columbia, on the Traditional Territories of the Secwepemcúl'ecw First Nations. I began a relationship with the eco-systems of the area in the fall of 2016 at an off-grid cabin on a property known as Singing Lands. On July 1st,2021 - one day following the Lytton Fire - the site was devastated by the Sparks Lake Fire. The cabin and surrounding land were close to my heart - a place where I developed a relationship with the weather, plant species, the over-population of noisy marmots, woodpeckers, wood rats, bears and lynx. The grasses, reeds, spruce and trembling aspens were a source of inspiration, attentiveness, and an outdoor studio for me when I stayed. Revisiting the site after the fire made our collective loss palpable.
The summer of 2021 was felt by many to be an environmental wake-up call for primary resource industries in Canada with record temperatures, unparalleled wildfires, and flooding in the province of BC. On labour day weekend of 2021, when the evacuation orders were lifted, I visited the Deadman Valley to document the affects of fire in the area. These photographs became the starting point for the exhibition Threadbare and led to me travelling to additional sites to document the affects of forest fires on local ecosystems.
While reviewing hundreds of photographs from the forests near Singing Lands, I found myself thinking about moths. The forests, that were once lively, were dark and muted, and moths although nocturnal have a curious relationship with light. I learned about moths’ roles in pollination, ecological restoration and was inspired by the role of their unravelled cocoons in wild silk production for textiles. I began working with an embroidered image of a saturniid moth and started unravelling and dissolving the image to consider the lack of kinship that accompanies colonial views of other species as resources resulting in a threadbare relationship with the ecological frameworks that sustain us. I began to wonder about: (1) the unravelling of an image (visual decay), (2) the dissolution of the autonomous self through ecological kinship and interdependence, and (3) environmental loss of species through individually centered socio-economic modes that treat sentient life as separate commodity resources. In all three of these instances there are different manifestations of threadbare relations as experienced through the loss of (1) the image (what is before our eyes), (2) the individual to the whole through ecological kinship, and (3) loss of interdependent ecosystems through commodity individuation.
Out of the photographs of the Sparks Lake Fire and the dissolving embroidered moths grew other works exploring interspecies kinship, displacement and loss. The exhibition Threadbare consists of twelve bodies of work that navigate the tension between perceptions of interspecies relations as exploitable resources and the longing for familial relations - sister, brother, mother, father, child, kin.
Connie Michele Morey, August 2024