In These Times, pas de deux, 2020
My practice is rooted in a decade of mourning, shaped by the loss of my husband and father within ten days of each other in 2016. The studio became a recovery room, where I turned to tactile materials and slow, deliberate making as a way to move through grief. Training as a death doula and in intentional movement, such as Butoh, deepened this process, allowing the body to speak through image and gesture.
Through disruption and pain, grief reveals the depth of love. I work to give structure to the complex emotional states loss evokes, such as loneliness, despair, tenderness, and fear. I often draw on elements of nature, such as water, a powerful material and metaphor that can both nurture and destroy, much as grief does. In this way, grief becomes common ground amid collective loss, strengthening our connection to each other and to our planet. That shared loss carries a social weight: it fosters the empathy a socially just society requires. Acknowledging grief is therefore an act of care. It also reveals who bears the cost, since those least responsible for harm often suffer the greatest losses, making care and accountability inseparable.
Connie Noyes, b. Washington, D.C. received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, where she received an MA in psychology and art therapy..Her work is informed by her training as a death doula and her studies in Butoh, which shape her approach to embodiment, ritual, and presence.
Noyes's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Ekstrom Library Photographic Archives Special Collections in Louisville, Kentucky, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Greenville County Museum in South Carolina. Selected solo exhibitions include "Dinner for Two Leftovers" at Abel Contemporary, "we are built in water" at the Evanston Art Center, and "A(mend)ed" at Wedge Projects. Her work has also been shown at Art Abu Dhabi and Art Bahrain through Salwa Zeidan Gallery in the UAE, and at the Biennale Internationale d'Art non-objectif in Pont-de-Claix, Grenoble. Projects including Silence is ______. Beep. Beep. Beep., "Untied|United," and "Under the Freeway" have been presented at the Terrain Biennial, on Governors Island, and during Chicago Artists Month as part of "The City as Studio." She is a recipient of the Cabins Haystack Residency Fellowship in Norfolk, CT, and two artist grants from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Awarded residencies include Monson Arts, Maine; NES Artist Residency, Iceland; TransArt, Berlin; Arteles Creative Center, Finland; CAMP, France; ChaNorth, New York; Emaar International Art Symposium, Dubai, UAE; and the Thupelo International Workshop, Cape Town, South Africa. She lives and works in Chicago.