Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 6 – 8 pm
*Guest speakers from Common Ground Relief and Glass Half Full at 7pm.
Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Marsh Keepers, a solo exhibition of environmental embroidery by Amélie Guthrie in celebration of the natural world and humanity's responsibility to cherish and protect it.
In her new large-scale embroidery, Amelie Guthrie channels these pleas into a pantheon of alligator activists. While Louisiana contends with the highest rate of wetlands loss in the country, she calls on her fellow swamp dwellers and earth lovers to protect their local marshes. Like patron saints of the swamps, these creatures plead for defense of their shared home. As Louisiana’s wetlands and its vulnerable inhabitants are daily destroyed, she’s summoned these gators to confront the viewer. What are we doing to save our home? What are you doing?
As with her alligators, she stitches what she wants the viewer to consider and hopefully treasure. A Louisiana Wild Heart and Another Louisiana Wild Heart are celebrations of the resplendence of Louisiana’s native flora. The first is a cornucopia of the state’s native flowers, and the second exalts local marsh grasses and mosses. All of this sacred botany adorns flaming hearts, a nod to the icon of the Blessed Mother’s flaming heart. A visual prayer, she hopes to stoke the flames in each chest to wilder environmental love and action. The Ghost Coast series is meant to attract the viewer with its bright pastels and seemingly abstract shapes. Posing as eye candy, it pulls one into its subject: projections of dramatic wetlands loss over the next few decades. Again, the threads highlight what she wants you to contemplate. Working from maps published in the Times Picayune’s “Louisiana 2050: Rising seas will upend life. Time is running out to limit the impact,” she’s divided Louisiana’s coast into fourths and has stitched the sections of Louisiana’s wetlands projected to disappear by 2070 if the climate crisis is ignored. Calling for a collective re-enchantment with native nature, she asks the viewer to cherish and protect it. Her female-spirited embroidery aims to invigorate the feminine strength in all communities, especially Louisiana.
With this body of work, I examine the rapid destruction of our local paradise and I want to talk about saving it. While man destroys the Earth and her vulnerable creatures, I pine for policy change in our state and country to better protect our planet, specifically our vulnerable wetlands. Each stitch a prayer, I aim to empower the feminine spirits among us. In this sinking world on fire, female energy is crucial for its salvation. For too long feminine powers and perspective have been missing from environmental leadership. Therefore, I’ve chosen embroidery, a traditionally feminine artistic medium, as my means of communication. Often dismissed as a trite pastime for women, embroidery has been used for activism, prayer, and community galvanization for generations. With my own stitchery, I infuse and invoke feminine energies in this quest for environmental healing and salvation. -Amélie Guthrie
Born and raised in New Orleans, Guthrie obtained her degree in art history from Vanderbilt University. She has exhibited extensively throughout Tennessee at the Red Arrow Gallery, ESPS Gallery, Nashville Fashion Alliance's Reclamation, O Gallery, Art and Invention Gallery, and Impact HUB, as well as at the Alembic Gallery, Rome, Italy and The World Youth Alliance International Arts Forum, NY. Her works are included in the public collections of The Children’s Museum of the Arts, NY, and the Historic Nashville Courthouse, TN. Guthrie was the recipient of an artist residency at the California Institute of the Arts in 2017 and was awarded the Periscope Pitch Judges' Choice Award in 2016.
Five percent of proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to Common Ground Relief.