|
Rimbun Dahan Exhibition
Catalogue Essay
HAVEN
Anne Morrison beckons you to hover over crevices, lie beneath canopies,
bury beneath undergrowth. Slip behind membranes. Peel back foliage. Slide
against cell walls.
The painted environments in Haven are both macro and microscopic,
bodily and earthly, scientific and sensory. The artist asks that you peer
deeper into the shadowy spaces that haunt the leaves, spores, and parasites
inhabiting the canvas. The surface of each work is similar to a forest
floor, where decaying leaves, peat, feathers, skeletons, and twigs collide
so that elements of each are only partially exposed. It is this fragmented
imagery that reflects her unique approach to representing the land: ‘the
layering experiences of place, relating to memories and to the movement
through the landscape.'1
During the 12 months at Rimbun Dahan, Morrison has dug into and reinterpreted
the organic fabric making up the vast garden that surrounds the studio.
At the beginning of the residency, Malaysia’s tropical forms were unknown,
and responses were acute and overwhelming. But time has allowed the artist
to study the foreign land through its flora, her perceptions and understanding
building with accelerating intensity. She has been able to track the seasonal
transformation of the plants so that smells and textures have become vividly
and evocatively familiar. The initial razor-sharp responses to the strangeness
of a new environment have matured into a complex series of observations
that compound with each painting, nourishing and anchoring both the artist
and her work in this place.
Morrison’s practice is a continuous process of inspecting and translating
the interface of tree, plant and grass forms. Cataloguing the extraordinary
colour, texture, and shape of tropical growth, she is a world away from
the Tasmanian seeds and grasses that triggered the preceding body of work.
These were fine, weightless structures, ‘simple forms, light and ephemeral,
carrying a multitude of possibilities upon a breath of air… seeds flying,
dancing in the wind, settling, perhaps seeding.’2
In contrast, the moisture-congested air in Malaysia leans on equivalent
biology, preventing flight and suppressing movement.
In Haven, colours are saturated, almost garish: turquoise, orange,
yellow and white, unlike the muted reds, blues and greys intrinsic to
Tasmania. Tropical patterns are webbed, not podded. Forms are plastic,
as if slackened by the heat, not taut like those plucked from a colder
climate. Paint is thinner and more viscous. Imagery is created through
spilling, dripping and pouring paint on canvas, and at other times by
employing methodical, repetitive brush marks. The artist’s visual language
is constructed from these diverse methods of paint application, and from
the ever-changing forms that surround her. Within this painted lexicon,
evolving and existing dialects are employed to reflect both newly-discovered
and reinterpreted forms.
Morrison’s more recent investigation of plants and landscape stems directly
from an earlier emphasis on the body. During the 1990s, she fused imagery
related to medical scans, diagrams, and x-rays, with maps of the land.
These works were also about the unfamiliar, but probed the darker regions
of the human body rather than the surface patterns of plants. They referred
to the vulnerability of the body, and our inability to understand the
path of foreign bodies and invasive cells. Red, pink, orange, and white
paint was spilled onto the canvas, staining and penetrating its surface
rather than resting with the modulated control of brush strokes. Veins,
sinew, plasma, and cells were manipulated to create trails that alluded
to mapping and the exploration of the unknown. Gradually, these paintings
have lead to the artist’s subtle inversion of imagery: from inner body
shapes that are suggestive of land, to land forms that allude to body.
Though perspectives shift from looking in, to looking out, each work continues
to be a highly personal landscape capturing the osmotic relationship between
body and land.
Weave, Scatter, Envelop, Lattice, Storm. These are titles of earlier
paintings that evoke strong imagery as words alone. They encourage bodily
engagement with the work: pulling, hugging, whispering. Like these previous
works, the images in Haven call the viewer towards Morrison’s unfolding
interpretations of dense tropical landscape. Plants resemble the hairs,
bones, veins of the body, and the heated colours mimic the effect of humidity.
‘The air is palpable … moisture is thick … beads of sweat gather on the
skin … one is continuously aware of one’s body….’3
As a personal catalogue of responses to a foreign environment, each work
is familiar yet strange. Lines are both sharp and blurred. Foreground
and background are combined. Fleeting forms are nearly recognisable, but
impossible to pinpoint. We are netted in pattern and movement, grasping
and sliding, aware only of our emotions and response to the landscape
before us. A haven.
Jane Stewart 2004.
Director, Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania.
1
MORRISON, Anne, Notes to the author, December 2003.
2
MORRISON, Anne, as
above.
3
MORRISON, Anne, as
above.
Biography
Born Glasgow, Scotland in 1966.
Morrison graduated with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts Degree with Honours at Glasgow School of Art in 1988 before
relocating to London to undertake a Master of Fine Arts at The Royal College
of Art, graduating in 1990. In 1995 she was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship
to undertake research in Australia and in 1999 she was among the first
to successfully complete a practice-based Doctorate in Fine Art at The
University of Tasmania.
Morrison has had 11 solo exhibitions
in the UK and Australia since 1989. Recent exhibitions include Cluster
at Despard Gallery Hobart Tasmania and Body and Land at Devonport
Regional Art Gallery Tasmania 2003, Weave of Nature at Essoign
Club Melbourne 2002, The Sentient Body at Plimsoll Gallery Hobart
1999 and Intermediate Ground at The Bond Store, Tasmanian Museum
and Art Gallery Hobart 1997.
Curated group exhibitions in 2003 include Love letter to China: Drawings
by 35 Australian Artists at Ivan Doherty Gallery Sydney (Touring China
2004), Painting Tasmanian Landscape at Plimsoll Gallery Hobart,
Future Perfect at Bett Gallery Hobart. Synergy at (Artist/Scientist
collaboration), CSIRO Hobart and My Father is the Wise Man of the Village
at Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, Scotland 2002, Zero Horizon at
CAST Gallery, Hobart 1999.
Arts awards and arts residencies include
The Fusion Arts Commission Edinburgh, 2001, The Scottish Arts Council
Small Assistance Award 1999, The Scottish Arts Councils One Year Australian
Arts Residency 1994-95, The Ensign Prize, Painting, Royal College of Art,
London 1990, The British Institution Fund (1st prize Painting), Royal
Academy, London and The John Minton Travel Award RCA 1989, The Elizabeth
Greenshields Award, Canada and The Jock Macfie Award, Glasgow School of
Art, 1988.
Work in art collections include The
Derwent Art Collection, Tasmania, The Scottish Arts Council, The Royal
College of Art London, The University of Tasmania, Ensign Trust London,
Devonport Regional Art Gallery, Aberdeen Hospital and Northfield Academy,
Aberdeen, Scotland and Hijjas Kasturi Associates/Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur.
Morrison is a Permanent Australian
Resident who works and resides in Forth, Tasmania.
For full Curriculum Vitae contact
Anne Morrison,
Anne Morrison is represented in Tasmania by Despard Gallery, Hobart
www.despard-gallery.com.au
|
