Featured Artist
Every quarter, we feature an artist or cultural creative on our website and on social media channels. Featured Artists are selected based on how they intersect with our vision to give voice and shape and movement to the new world emerging from the edges. Priority is given to edgewalkers - those on the margins of mainstream culture, in the cracks of cultural emergence. "Art" includes any medium - visual, performed, written, moving, spoken, etc. If you, or someone you know, aligns with this vision, and would like to be featured, please get in touch with us!
Featured Artist Fall/Winter 2021
Amelia Morrison
Wild Honey Collective
@wildhoney.collective
on Instagram
"My mother and father named me Amelia Raine, which is Celtic for Queen, and I am not going to say that it *wasn't* a coincidence that I find myself drawn to the majestic Queendom of the honey bees. I am a cultural worker who understands the critical role of creativity and storytelling in shaping how we understand ourselves, our capabilities, culpabilities, and our potentialities as a collective.
The unfolding of this work began when I stumbled upon a local agroecology network intersecting farming, education, and hospitality, and 8 years later it has taken me here: a professional beginner who experiments abundantly in the arts of farming, podcasting, film making, movement building, bike wandering, sunset watching, poetry, dance, and celebration. I am on a quest to rediscover the wild altar of nature-based ancestral wisdom that lives in us all through our senses; and to craft those sensual offerings of sustenance into medicine for our bodies, minds and spirits. The Wild Honey Collective supports that quest by bringing others into it, sharing insights, and creating a social structure where we can come together in person to build on the ideas shared through the podcast."
"I express my artistic work as the Wild Honey Collective Podcast, a storied listening space where we pollinate ideas about how we can alchemize wild sources of wealth into health by learning from the wisdom of ecosystems. In particular, we look to the wild honey bees, who do the work of pollination not only to nurture the next generation to life, but to nurture all life by bringing to fruition the food we eat. The bees thrive in highly organized, female-led social structures, where every individual role serves the Queen, who supports the life of the collective.
Yet even within what our culture might consider a masculine social structure-hierarchal, ordered, & efficient-all communication about how the bees navigate each other to the sources of nectar are expressed through the "feminine" form of dance. In my effort to highlight stories that navigate us to artful, cooperative work that nurtures life, I hold this contradiction as a model for how we can dance between seemingly opposing expressions to weave a unified story about how reorienting ourselves to the wealth & health of our common home can help us find wealth & health in ourselves."
Q: In what ways do you identify yourself as an "edgewalker" (someone on the edge of dominant racial, gendered, religious, cultural norms?) Or, how does your art or creativity express this?
"The 'wild' in wild honey is the edge between the familiar and the unknown; the threshold of presence between where we have come from and where we are going; and the frontier between stories the we have inherited and those we create. My identity as one who bears life in a societal structure designed to extract and exploit it means that any act of caretaking I make, whether for myself, others, or Mother earth, is an act of resistance. I believe there is no place on earth that is not sacred, but there are very few left that have not been desecrated (to paraphrase Wendell Berry).
I am committed to standing on the edge of those sacred places to protect them from desecration by an extractive system that will consume everything in its path if not stopped-even the life of future generations. The bees remind us to stay together and keep dancing. They are poisoned by the chemicals we use to grow food, even as they make it possible for us to eat. Standing on the edge, you can see two disparate halves coming together. In ecosystems, there is no flourishing like that of an edge. In carrying stories and carrying life forward through individual and collective acts of caretaking, we can reclaim what is of deepest value and choose to protect it."