Chrissie Orr

Chrissie Orr is an artist, activist, and the founder of the SeedBroadcast Collective, whose work focuses on the interaction between and integration of the natural and human worlds.

Although she was born in Scotland, artist Chrissie Orr now calls Santa Fe, New Mexico home. “I live in a land that is not home,” the artist says, keenly aware that she inhabits an adopted space. Because of this fact, not in spite of it, Orr quite literally roots her art practice in the land itself.

As founder of the SeedBroadcast Collective, she explores “bioregional agri-Culture and seed action through collective inquiries and hands-on creative practices” by “sav[ing] seeds and shar[ing] their gifts” in order to “grow food and share its abundance, and to cultivate grassroots wisdom and share its creativity.” In addition to her involvement with the SeedBroadcast Collective, Orr is the creative practice fellow at the Academy for the Love of Learning and the co-founder of El Otro Lado Project and the Institute for Living Story.

As is the case with much of her work, Orr’s photo collage Connection attends to “a relational aesthetic around community,” composed of both human and non-human beings coexisting in a “site with issues relevant to both.” The photographs in her Connection project begin with deep observation practices, which then activate a “collective vision for social and environmental transformation.”

Connection employs fragmented imagery that focuses on the interaction between, and integration of, the natural and human worlds. This combinatory aesthetic demonstrates their complex interactions and enmeshment. While we often consider these worlds disparate, Connection asks us to consider our human presence as similar to, overlapping with, and part of nature. In doing so, the artist hopes that Connection will call attention to New Mexico’s “dry landscape and to cultivate a deeper understanding that our water is so much more than precious.”

“Water,” Orr says, “is life, [and we] should be in a symbiotic relationship with her.”

“These are urgent times,” Orr implores, and she wants her photo collages to highlight this fact, demonstrating the Southwest biosphere as something that is “alive, resilient, and steeped in mystery ready to be uncovered.”