Jaime Black-Morsette is a Red River Métis artist and activist, with family scrip signed in the community of St Andrews, Manitoba. Jaime lives and works on her home territory near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Founder of The REDress project in 2009, Black-Morsette has been using their art practice as a way to gather community and create action and change around the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls across Turtle Island for over a decade. Black-Morsette’s interdisciplinary art practice includes immersive film and video, installation art, photography and performance art practices. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, place and resistance.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Throughout my artistic career I have travelled and exhibited an installation project called The REDress Project across Canada and internationally. This work draws attention to the systemic colonial frameworks that result in violence against indigenous women and girls. While working with and through trauma, it became necessary to expand my perspective to recognize the immense capacity for creating strength, wisdom and power through healing practices tied to reconnecting with land, water and Indigenous cultural/spiritual practices.
Over the past six years my practice has expanded to explore all the ways in which myself and community find healing and reconnection while at the same time continuing to experience violence and colonialism. For my work this has meant a shift towards embodiment and working with and through the body in connection with the lands, waters and circles of women. This work brought me to create a series of photographs in 2017 entitled ‘conversations with the land’ in which intimate/cathartic and healing moments between myself and the land work as a way to express and release trauma and to regain a sense of grounding and power. Throughout the years I have created many performance art pieces, photographic works and, more recently, video works that explore the concept of going to the lands and waters to heal and to reconnect to self. In the last year I have been centering my practice around the importance of water as a living entity, capable of holding, caring for and nurturing all of life on earth and exploring our connection to water through my work.
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