ARTIST PROFILE - A SENSITIVE AND POETIC REALIST 

Lone Mørch, Cand. Scient. Adm., has 25+ years of international experience from Europe, Asia and USA as a project maker and producer within the field of sustainable development, education and entrepreneurship, and independent as a film producer, photographer, author and speaker.

Based on her innate emotional and intellectual openness and elastic consciousness, her focal point for her work has been development and the inner and outer workings of transformation. In the encounter with different cultures, she has had the opportunity to closely study how language, beliefs, values, socio-economic and cultural hierarchies of power are at play in intricate ways on the personal, organizational and societal level, and how narratives shape each our personal and collective reality. And, hence why change processes are often so complex and difficult.

Lone Mørch's master thesis focused on Nepal's democratization process in the 90s and why institution export from the West often fail. In her fieldwork for CARE Nepal, which was already working holistically in the project areas at the time, she developed methods to strengthen the sustainability of local organizations. During the dotcom boom in San Francisco, she was team leader and coach for an American branch of the Danish KaosPilot University. Here she facilitated the development of ‘change agents’ in a chaotic world. Captivated by San Francisco, Lone stayed in the U.S., where she later, as a media producer, made short films about social empowerment in the ghetto, land preservation and sustainability in companies.

PHOTOGRAPHY - light and shadow 

Through her work with visual story-telling, Lone Mørch discovered the catalytic power of the camera, and opened her own studio for women's self-discovery through confidential photographic explorations. With her poetic and gentle gaze, she has focused on women's bodies, identities, sexualities, experiences and liberation processes, especially in the USA and Denmark, and helped more than 1000 women and few men, of all ages, to find wholeness and acceptance in themselves. This work became publicly available in 2018, with the publication of the book EMBODY. An exclusive hardcover book, in which she reflects on her intimate photographic encounter with women through photography and prose. The book is a psychologically mature, heartfelt, loving and supportive document that sheds light on women's bodies, minds and psyches and shows how they try to regain power over and relationship with their bodies, themselves. EMBODY was well received in Denmark and abroad. Lone Mørch participated in launch events and talks in San Francisco, Paris and Copenhagen and in the autumn of 2018, she was a speaker at TEDxAarhus. Under the title The Power Of The Gaze, her contribution explored the power of the gaze to limit and liberate us. 

WOMEN'S LIBERATION - Growing up in a man’s world

Lone Mørch grew up in a working-class family in the slip stream of flower-power and the women's liberation movement. Despite the opportunities to educate herself and create a more free life than the women before her, she has nevertheless boxed with the often subtle, invisible and unconscious limitations that a patriarchal society has imparted her with. A paradigm where the masculine experience is perceived as exemplary and universal, while the female is private and suspicious. Conversely, the man's body is private, while the woman's body is seen as public: a container for the next generation and an object of desire for media, man and fashion.

Like so many women of her generation, Lone fought for equality on men's terms, until the costs of denying her inner life, her feminine nature and intuitive way of knowing became too obvious and could no longer be ignored. Thus, she herself had to reclaim her own feminine sovereignty and points to the shared awakening and solidarity among women, and including men, as an essential part of reaching a sense of equal worth, voice and participation in living and shaping our culture.

LANDSCAPES - INNER AND OUTER

Throughout her life, Lone Mørch has wandered and walked and lost herself in the landscapes, she’s lived within or sought out for exploration, strength, solace and pilgrimage. From her childhood at her grandparents' homesteads and the lush fjord and agricultural landscapes of Denmark to her love affair with the spectacular Himalayan region, and later the "wild west" of America, those landscapes have imprinted themselves in her inner landscape as spiritual geographical experiences, mental maps and emotional anchoring. It is through this dialog with the land, the animals, the seasons, she ‘connects’ to the intelligence and greatness of life, and experiences humility and gratitude; and feel "most at home." To lose this would be to lose oneself. She has among other things, studied Nature Therapy, Eros and Ecology, and Grief Tending to meet her own eco-grief and elaborate her understanding of the human-nature potential as a way to heal ourselves and our world, and as such, it may be no coincidence, that Lone has used nature for many years, as her preferred partner and studio for her empowerment and photographic work with women.

ECO FEMININE - Towards an earthbound Spirituality

The desire to know the mysteries of life and belong to this world has motivated Lone Mørch’s deep curiosity and exploration of the tangible and intangible dimensions of existence. Contrary to her upbringing in Denmark, where it was a bit dangerous to talk about the soul and the divine, she had during her years in Nepal the opportunity to experience spirituality as an integral ritual part of daily life and a life style founded on a more direct interdependence with the cosmos, the weather and the environment. It was here her interest in feminine wisdom - the connection between the body, the earth cycles and the archetypal faces of the feminine - was aroused, an interest she has been unfolding further in the innovative and experimental San Francisco, where the interconnectedness between spirituality, consciousness, eco-psychology, art, mythology, body, nature, regeneration, quantum physics and more were an integral part of the discourse. From having sought freedom and levity in spiritual transcendence, Lone has found more authentic freedom and living wisdom through embodiment, dance, nature, creativity and relationship. In her autobiographical book Seeing Red: A Woman’s Quest for Truth, Power and the Sacred (2012), she describes her own journey with freedom, power and the sacred. In the book, she tries to show how a modern Western woman has to battle both the internal and external patriarchal paradigm, she’s been shaped by in her quest for freedom of body and soul.

LOVE OF THE WORLD - The rewilding is on

Today, in her work, Lone draws on her Nordic origins, her personal and professional experiences in both the East and the West, her long-term commitment to women's (and men’s) liberation and her interest in the workings and rewilding of ourselves, our narratives and willingness to wonder and be moved.

As the world becomes increasingly complex and erratic, staying sane has, to Lone, become a fulltime occupation. Severe longcovid and the infamous “menopausal remodelling” has deepened her understanding of disembodiment and the intricate body-brain path to healing and transformation. To her, the world’s nervous system is under pressure and eco-grief and mental health issues are but signs of health. She is driven by her own despair over the consequences of the climate crisis, watching how our blind materialism and desire for all things artificial, and ultimately our lack of imagination, is driving the living world over the abyss. She sees herself as one among many others, who seek to understand how to re-wild ourselves and discover the new perspectives and paths we need to reset, reintegrate and care for life. To her, an inner re-wilding is required for an external shift in our values and behaviours to take real root. 

As an artist, storyteller and creative catalyst, she wants to inspire and use her voice, art and love for the world to create new brave visions that we can step into and embody. We, our bodies, psyches and earth home, need this like never before.

Artist Profile, Archnonon Magazine, New Zealand, 2021