On the artwork of Jodi Connelly
The place where this work begins is not Jodi Connelly’s place. For eight thousand years, it was stewarded and sustained by Native Americans––the Lake Miwok and Hill Patwin. In later periods, the land around the McLaughlin Reserve near Knoxville was settled by homesteaders, and used for mining, mercury and then gold. The last of the mining ended in 1996. The land technically belongs to the Homestake Mining Company of California and has operated as the Donald and Sylvia McLaughlin Natural Reserve since 2002. It is lovingly and carefully managed by Cathy Koehler (who provided invaluable insight and information to both Jodi and this writer) and Paul Aigner.
Ninety percent of grasses in California are non- native. Many are invasive. In order to make this work, Jodi approached the landscape with curiosity: What did this landscape look like 400 years ago? What would happen if I removed the non-native plants and planted native seeds? She was driven by a question that had been posed to her during a studio visit by a Native American artist: “Does this land know you?” It did not.
Reparations are tricky and Jodi’s experiment is fraught with all the complications that come with reparations between humans and land, but also between humans and humans. It is difficult for me to view this project without thinking about how hard many of us are working to make reparations. From dam removal to the repopulation of animal species to the many social experiments in which we (white folks) try to re-level the playing field between ourselves and the many populations from whose suffering we have profited.
What you see in the gallery is a small sampling of the invasive plants that Jodi removed. Dry star thistle and avena; plants that came to be in that place through many years of migration and resettling after the native dwellers were pushed out, slaughtered or perished from the diseases the colonists carried across the ocean and then the continent. In their place, Jodi seeded native plants: Mountain dandelion, milkweed, dove weed, blue dicks, wild hyacynth, narrow tarplant, slender cottonweed, bunch grasses like blue wild rye, one-sided bluegrass, purple needlegrass. In the relatively short span of this project, these plants did not germinate, which does not mean that they won’t at some point. As Cathy explained to me –
the seeds are darned resilient and don’t just germinate when you think they should. The seeds of the native plants are extremely good at holding out (remaining dormant) until they experience just the right conditions.
I wonder how long will they hold out and I am in awe of the resilience of living things. The original path Jodi made on the land resembles a scratch in the landscape, lined with pink surveyor tape. The invasive species continue to grow back, for now.
Jodi’s work walks a line between land art and land management. What can we, as consumers of artwork, glean from it? For me, this process is about how we strive to repair damage. But the larger question is about the impact on the land. And the absence of an answer points to our smallness in comparison to it.
If you don’t see the photos of Jodi in a Tyvek suit spraying herbicide on the invasive species, in order to make room for the native ones she hoped would make a home there, her small body looking like a spaceman, you might think she was a benevolent nature lover. But there is no such thing. We are always interacting with the land. It is my understanding, and it may be a generalization, that the Indigenous peoples of this continent were better at it then we are, more reciprocal. Jodi was striving to alter the land, to repair it. What was revealed to her might be the difficulty of our short life spans, relative to the cycles of the land. But the timely human metaphor revealed by this work is how tough it is to heal from the damage that colonization––and here I mean to include indigenous peoples and the Africans that were brought here forcibly––has caused to our fragile human ecosystem.
For me, these images demonstrate the complicated work of trying to seed and root ourselves without taking over the whole ground. This work here is how the land starts to know Jodi. It is their discourse, their refrain which spans generations and the chorus is repair, reveal, heal and repeat.
Originally published in Present Tense: 2018 Art Studio MFA University of California, Davis. 2018
Meredith Arena 