the G R O U N D S H O T S P R O J E C T
creatively gathers ideas
about how we engage the land
through curious conversations,
& unique ethnobotanically informed education
without a greater sense of connection to the land, we have little hope for advocating for it's wellbeing
we as individuals are merely different expressions of wildness itself
KELLY MOODY is the main curator behind the project.
She grew up in rural southern Virginia near the border of North Carolina in tobacco and muscadine country. Growing up here, she went to her grandma's house daily as a child, where fresh biscuits and iced tea were a regular necessity. Her other grandma was a determined plant lady who started a nursery business on the outskirts of their small rural town, which remained open for almost 50 years. Kelly grew up hiding with her sister in the tropical greenhouses, taking craft classes in the small nursery workshop, shelling green beans and canning tomatoes. These experiences of being on the family farm, working with plants and creating followed Kelly into her adulthood.
The past decade and a half she has spent living simply in different landscapes studying plants, ecology and craft, writing about the land, growing food and herbs, or honoring her wanderlust by living on the road.
Kelly received a B. A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies in 2009 from Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She has studied herbal medicine, land tending, ecology and botany with Rebecca Golden in southern Vermont, Paul Strauss and Chip Carrol at the Goldenseal Sanctuary in southeast Ohio, Luke Learningdeer and Marc Williams in western North Carolina. She apprenticed with Juliet Blankespoor and attended the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, NC in 2013.
She helped manage the food and medicine, permaculture gardens at Dancing Springs Farm in Asheville, NC from 2014-2016.
She studied book arts and paper-making at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She taught hide tanning techniques for classes held by the medieval bookbinder Jim Croft at his rural Idaho homestead from 2017-2019.
She has completed a handful of art + activism focused artist residencies and workshops including Signal Fire's month-long Wide Open Studios program during the summer of 2017 in the Pacific Northwest and in the fall of 2019 in the Southwest. These programs greatly influenced the trajectory of her work connecting creativity and human relationship with ecology.
In Summer 2020, she hiked the Colorado Trail with Gabe Crawford documenting plants on foot and made notes on wild food and medicine gardens found along the old Ute pathways.
Her educational work over the years has included hosting classes on hide tanning, plant ID, wild foods, medicine making, natural dyes, nutrition and gardening. In 2023, she facilitated field ecology classes through Groundwork in western Colorado.
She has been running the Ground Shots Podcast since 2017.
Kelly’s interest in storytelling and cross-cultural dialogue comes from both an upbringing in the small-town rural south and the inspiration of meeting people while living on the road.
the project acknowledges the reality of stolen land and wants to have ongoing conversations about what this means, who has access to land, why we treat it certain ways
