Kris Curtis Morse

Kris Curtis Morse, a Maryland-based photographer and art educator, creates nature-inspired works using eco-friendly processes like Chlorophyll printing. Her art fosters healing, connection to nature, and advocacy for environmental awareness, blending photography with her passion for herbalism and education.
From: Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
Shows: Chlorophyll prints

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Kris Curtis Morse is a photographer, art educator, nature lover, and herbalist living in Maryland in the eastern United States. In her adolescence, she discovered the therapeutic effects of photography and hiking and began to understand the vital importance of noting the changes in and advocating for wildlife and our natural environment. Summers growing up in a cabin shared by three generations of her family along the wooded shores of Lake Champlain, VT, and learning of the history of this land further instilled a reverence in her for plants, animals, wild landscapes, ancestral knowledge, and of the immersive sense of awe and well-being they provide us. As a teaching-artist, Kris educates teens that artists and art-making have the power to heal, inform, and to foster positive change and joy in life. If students express concern that one person can’t make a difference, Kris encourages them to look more closely, to seek the extraordinary hidden in day-to-day experiences — including their own abilities and possibilities. “It’s easy for us to put down our own abilities because they seem so ordinary but, like an unremarkable seeming “weed” that contains powerful medicinal healing properties, we all have the ability to make changes for good”, Kris writes on her website, Botany, Bird Songs & Black Skirts. It is Kris’s hope that in using non-toxic “green” darkroom processes such Chlorophyll printing and Anthotype, documenting healing plants and the beauty of our natural environment, she will model for the next generation how we can make the world a better place, beginning with our ways of seeing and thinking and with the plants in our own backyards.

About Kris Curtis Morse’s process:
My photographic images were all created using the Chlorophyll Printing technique. I first photocopied positives of old family photographs onto transparency film. I then contact-printed the positives on leaves under direct sunlight to bleach the chlorophyll. Leaves that were successfully exposed to create an image were then returned to my garden where I documented them with a DSLR camera in their natural environment. The leaf images are documented with a camera because chlorophyll prints are impermanent and because it’s my intent that the photographs tell a story about my family and our connection to nature’s healing powers.
The images in Folio 1 were documented using frontlighting. The images in Folio 2 were backlit.

“I am inspired by relationships, Art and learning, culture and adventure, flora and fauna, light and life, mystery and wonder, history and human potential.”

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