Dr. Wendy Morris
- Research unit: Intermedia
- Research topics:
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Critical fabulation and the impossibility of recuperating enslaved narratives
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Ancient herbals - local knowledge
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Writing as artistic practice
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Uttering and vocal transfer of knowledge
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Experimental animated film
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Wendy Morris (South African/Belgian) is an artist and professor in contemporary art at KU Leuven and LUCA. Unique to her current practice are her Libraries, Diaries, Dictionaries, Letters and Travelogues.
Morris is currently working on the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Through an examination of European, African, and Asian histories of plant contraceptives Morris is exploring bodies of knowledge that would have flowed to the settlement at the Cape in the 17th century and informed the practice of a midwife in the Slave Lodge. For the Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) Morris made A Tale of Eleven Births, and for the group show Alias (Netwerk Aalst 2019) The Travelogue of the Wandering Womb, Her Fantastic Encounters and Curious Utterings, both are works in the Nothing of Importance project. From 2020-2023 Morris will be working on HORTUS+HERBARIUM, a Garden of Virtues (set in the enclosed medicinal garden of the Stedelijk Museum, Aalst) and a herbarium of emmenagogues. Nothing of Importance is a collaborative project, involving city gardeners, botanists and botanical gardens (Belgium, Netherlands and South Africa), healers and kruiedokters, artists, writers and composers, art history interns, and the kunsthal Netwerk Aalst.
In 2013 Morris obtained a doctorate in the arts (KU Leuven and LUCA) with a set of three animation films and 52 letters.
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