My art practice centres around the concept of traces. It is a gathering of threads, impressions, a feeling left in the corner of a room, the place where someone cried or laughed or was last seen. The resonance left behind in someone’s absence, the lingering feeling of their undeniable presence.
But this work isn’t only about a mournful absence of the physical; it is also always about the palpable presence of the metaphysical.
It is the work of listening to history, my own history and the history of others, hearing the voices of those who couldn’t speak up or out, uncovering what has been obscured.
This work began with a red dress. An empty red dress, a powerful presence holding space in the places where Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit peoples have been erased. A red dress to remember, a red dress to reclaim, a red dress to rally us all in a collective cry: WE ARE STILL HERE.
Over the years, the REDress Project has become a flashpoint that has stoked the fires of community solidarity and the fight for justice for MMIWG2S. Making visible the traces of our histories and continued struggles has ignited collective memory and reoriented the public towards addressing the ongoing harms of colonialism.
To know where we are going, we must first remember where we have been. This work is a way of addressing the silence and shame surrounding the experiences of violence of those close to me, of speaking out where they felt they couldn’t, and picking up on the traces of what was left unsaid.
Through this healing practice, I too came to notice the traces I left, to retrieve the parts of myself that I had silenced or abandoned out of fear, the parts of myself I wanted to heal, to carefully consider what traces I hoped to leave in my own wake. And in this process, I remembered my own power and began to speak where I once was silent, to stand out in the places where I used to shrink. By acknowledging and making space for the traces of myself, my family, my ancestors, and our collective community, I hope to encourage healing and reconnection.
Above: Jaime Black-Morsette, untitled, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
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.
This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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