Connected to the Land brings together six women artists whose work explores the deep connections between land, memory, and creative labor. Through diverse artistic practices, these works highlight the voices of rural women whose roles as creators and custodians of cultural traditions are intimately tied to identity, materials, and the landscapes they inhabit. England’s photographs, stitched by her and her mother’s hands, express the emotional and physical connections to the land lost through familial displacement. Ancestral ties and inherited stories thread through Farmer’s work, where family artifacts and mythologies shape an understanding of the past’s influence on the present. Jakins’ film reflects the intertwined lives of rural women in the American West, whose creativity and survival are bound to the land and their matriarchal responsibilities. Stone’s oil-based chemigrams evoke the scars left by extractive industries, mirroring the permanent marks on both land and the communities that depend on it. Traditional crafts, passed through generations, feature prominently in the work of Degroff, as her use of Shibori and plant-based dyes reflects the harmony between the fabric and the natural world. While Tsoutsounakis’ multimedia pieces blend textiles, pigments, and narratives of women’s labor from Crete to rural Utah, emphasizing the universal resonance of women’s creative labor across time and place. Collectively, these works explore significant and complicated cultural narratives of rural women, their labor, and their deep-rooted connection to the land.
Connected to the Land is presented in tandem with Crossroads: Change in Rural America, on view at the Snow College Karen H. Huntsman Library October 19 - December 15, 2024.
About the Artists
ODETTE ENGLAND is a photographer and writer who has exhibited her work in more than 115 museums and galleries worldwide. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received grants and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman, among many others. She has been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award (twice) and the Prix Pictet. England has also published five award-winning books and her sixth will debut in October 2024. England graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and received her Ph.D. in 2018. odetteengland.com
RAY FARMER is an artist who uses ceramics and quilts to dissect and reimagine stories that get passed down through families, institutions, and pop culture—especially mythologies of the American West, and the artist’s own early Mormon ancestry—with a queer, feminist bent. A New York-based artist who grew up in Utah, Farmer has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Brigham Young University. They have shown work in a number of exhibitions including: Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT 2023-24, 2020-21); Jane Hartsook Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Granary Arts, Ephraim, UT (2018, 2013); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY (2017); and A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017, 2013, 2012). Farmer was a Fellowship Artist at A.I.R. Gallery (2013-14) and has been an artist in residence at Greenwich House Pottery (2021), Space on Ryder Farm (2019), the Museum of Arts and Design (2016), and Brush Creek Arts (2014). rachelfarmer.com
Director/Producer CARLY JAKINS is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been curated by LA Times, The Atlantic, POV, and Independent Lens. Jakins received the Audience Choice Award at Full Frame Film Festival for American Seams in 2024. Her debut, Ghosts on the Mountain, was the short documentary award winner at the American Society for Visual Anthropology and Heartland Film Festival in 2014. Jakins has produced and co-directed several other award-winning short documentaries, including producing the feature documentary, Scenes From the Glittering World (PBS, 2022). She is currently engaged in exploring the experiences of rural women near her home in the Western United States. theplains.com
JANE ROBERTS DEGROFF is a textile artist specializing in Shibori techniques and natural dyes. She draws inspiration from colors in nature and her female ancestors who were makers. DeGroff grew up on a dairy farm in western Wyoming and remembers playing under quilts stretched on frames, surrounded by women from her family and community. The sounds of women talking and laughing while stitching were comforting and created a sense of security. Shibori patterns are created by stitching and pulling the threads tight to create a resist before dyeing. These stitch-resist techniques are inherently slow and repetitive. For DeGroff, this practice has a calming and meditative effect. Combined with harvesting local plants and making dyes, the artist reflects on the processes as restorative and healthy in a world that is increasingly anxious and rushed. Fabric plays a significant part in the emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of our lives. DeGroff received a BFA from Brigham Young University and resides in rural Sanpete Valley.
ELIZABETH STONE is a Montana-based visual artist exploring potent themes of memory and time deeply rooted within the ambiguity of photography. Stone’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill,NC; Candela Collection, Richmond, VA; Archive 192, New York City, NY; and Nevada Museum of Art Special Collections Library, Reno, NV. Fellowships include Cassilhaus, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Arts, the National Park Service, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts through the Montana Fellowship Award from the LEAW Foundation (2019). Recent awards include the Arthur Griffin Award (2024), the inaugural Critical Mass Archive 192 Award (2023) and the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 (2022). Process drives Stone’s work as she continues to push and pull at the edge of what defines and how we see the photograph. elizabethstone.com
ELPITHA TSOUTSOUNAKIS is a Cretan American designer, printer, and educator based in Salt Lake City. She is a founding faculty and assistant professor in the Division of Multi-disciplinary Design at the University of Utah where she teaches visual strategy, research methods, and design studio. She completed a BS in architecture at the University of Utah and a Master’s in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Her creative practice with Ochre engages design ethics and materiality through feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist relations to more-than-human worlds. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Southwest Contemporary and she was named a 2023 Design Arts Fellow by the Utah State Division of Arts and Museums. unknownprospect.org
Crossroads: Change in Rural America has been made possible in Ephraim by Utah Humanities and Granary Arts presented in partnership with Snow College Karen H. Huntsman Library. Crossroads is part of Museum on Main Street, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and state humanities councils nationwide. Support for Museum on Main Street has been provided by the United States Congress.