Connie Heller
Drawn & Repulsed, 2023
Series composed of four inherited monogramed napkins embroidered with silk and cotton thread with image transfer. 20" x 20"
Nostalgia Hides the Ugly Truth/ A Deceit to Hide Slaughter and Dispossession/ Near and Far a Grim Treasure Trove/ Drawn and Repulsed: Inheritance. As I sort through my mother’s belongings, my inheritance, I feel myself caught between. On the one hand, I am drawn to the heroic stories, memories and artifacts of my mother’s European and later Texan family. While, on the other hand, my father’s families stories, my own experiences and research, leave me feeling troubled and repulsed. What do we do with these histories of ours? How do we hold on to our love for our families, while also acknowledging and reconciling the harms they participated in, so we might all move forward together into a truthful future?
Connie Heller
Fly Me to the Moon (Eight Petal Flower), 2025
Indigo dyed panel made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Each panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 50” x 54”
Memories and histories are powerful but fleeting reminders of the past that haunts our everyday with remnants of stories we will never know. Written history may aspire to be a neat narrative of linear progress, but the experiences of war, colonization, transnational migration and the passage of time in the Philippines, as elsewhere, leave a murky wake of partial stories and song fragments seen by the light of an overcast moon. Colonial destruction robs us of compelling details and leaves a disrupted and distorted archive upon which we must build. Descendants, born into the American diaspora, must reclaim and refashion their songs and stories from the fragments found amongst archives, family stories and memories.
Connie Heller
Fly Me to the Moon (Six Petal Flower), 2025
Indigo dyed panel made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Each panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 50” x 54”
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants (Street Vendor), 2024
Indigo dyed panel made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 27” x 72”
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants (Marie Clara), 2023
Indigo dyed panel made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 27” x 72”
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants (Pintado), 2021
Indigo dyed panel made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 27” x 72”
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants Installation View 2 (American Betrayal and Tutelage), 2024
Sixty panel installation of 27” x 72” indigo dyed panels made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Each panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 1100 SF (variable).
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants Installation View 1 (Tenaciously of Place and Spanish Colonization), 2024
Sixty panel installation of 27” x 72” indigo dyed panels made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Each panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament 1100 SF (variable).
When my father returned to the Philippines, I was left with only scattered memories and fragments of rituals, sounds, gestures and tastes of belonging. Through this collection of work, I wonder, is this personal loss and disorientation entirely distinct from experiences shared by repeatedly colonized and displaced peoples the world over? Is it possible to reclaim a semblance of continuity by resuscitating our history and thus asserting our right to exist? Slowly and methodically, I search both personal and public archives seeking insights that have been lost to time—often through purposeful destruction and displacements caused by serial colonization and its unsettling wake. I dye, layer and stitch, inviting the past into our present, claiming memories that haunt my existence and seeking ghosts with whom I want to be in conversation. In Blue Remnants, I try to make sense of the histories and cultures that shape my every day, but that I struggle to know.
Connie Heller
Blue Remnants: Walang Father, Walang Ancestors, 2023
Installation composed of seven overlapping 27” x 72” indigo dyed panels made of silk organza, hand tied and stitched indigo-dyed cotton with hand-sewn thread markings and gold leaf. Each panel is supported by an aluminum rod suspended with microfilament. 14' x 9' x 2'
In the Blue Remnants series, I try to make sense of the history and culture I inherit as a mixed-race, Filipino-American. My father returned to the Philippines when I was 14 years old to escape the dehumanizing, white supremacist culture of the United States. With him, my direct tie to Filipino culture, food, and language left, defeated. And thus began my experience of never quite belonging, of not quite knowing where to find my cultural inheritance. I was left only with memories. But is this personal experience entirely different from the broader experience of a repeatedly colonized nation where so much history and culture comes in the form of ghosts, tortured memories, and cobbling together a narrative of continuity from what remains?
