Between the world and me
Anne Morrison
5 Nov 2021 – 30 Jan 2022
Between the world and me, is a survey exhibition of Tasmanian painter Anne Morrison. Anne takes inspiration from the intersection of body and land and the intricate networks, processes and patterns found in nature – she distils her distinctive canvases into painterly abstractions with the poetic power to speak to broader concerns of ecology, climate, nature, memory, and place. The ability to organise and remember our journeys, and to pass that information on to others, is an essential part of being human. The way we navigate experience, space and emotion is intrinsically linked to memory, and to storytelling.
We invite you to enjoy the Exhibition Essay by Dr Troy Ruffels below.
Small worlds, acrylic on linen, 122 x 137cm, 2020, Courtesy of the Artist and Despard Gallery
Habitat II, acrylic on linen, 56 x56cm, 2020, Courtesy of the Artist and Despard Gallery
Anne Morrison in her Studio in Forth , Tasmania
Archive, acrylic on linen, 140 x 170cm, 2020, Courtesy of the Artist and Despard Gallery
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Between the world and me
Between the world and me, is a survey exhibition of Tasmanian painter Anne Morrison. Anne takes inspiration from the intersection of body and land and the intricate networks, processes and patterns found in nature – she distils her distinctive canvases into painterly abstractions with the poetic power to speak to broader concerns of ecology, climate, nature, memory, and place. The ability to organise and remember our journeys, and to pass that information on to others, is an essential part of being human. The way we navigate experience, space and emotion is intrinsically linked to memory, and to storytelling.
There is a thread that connects this selection of work – marking a passage of time and travel. It is the same thread linking observations of the natural world to broader rhythms, migratory patterns, and experiences. Encoded within the surface of ‘Small Worlds’ (2020) – mycelium like networks, the dispersal patterns of spores and seeds – the lattice like contour-lines, weave above and below the painting’s image plane like a coiling strand of DNA. These suggested interconnections amplify Morrison’s fascination with the representation of nature through painting processes in conjuring ideas of immersion and being truly present in the world.
Anne is a collector and fossicker, she gathers, studies, and documents what she finds during her wanderings in local landscapes – fossilised corals, sea-sponges, seaweeds, nests, foliage, leaves, branches, and lichen. These collections are both subjects and signifiers of meaning – observed and interpreted directly into paintings while remaining holders of memory that influence her work more than just their physical presence. They are markers of time and archives of memory.
The traces left by memory are an ongoing fascination in Morrison’s practice, amplifying the murmur of voices and histories that speak to the precious ecological framework of living systems. ‘Archive’ (2020), is a work that evolved from considering the phenomena of coral bleaching, and the wonder and vulnerability of ecosystems. Coral reefs are often likened as being rainforests of the sea, or as living archives – like the growth rings visible within a cut tree, they are markers of time, echoing and recording changes in climate.
Deliberately ambiguous, the paintings seem to capture ‘an in-between state’ where worlds and forms hover in a simultaneous process of emerging or dissolving. Using fluid painting processes, she pours and spills the liquid pigment and combines this with carefully applied and considered lines and networks. The minuscule tiny patterns within a spore or a cell echo star nebulas and galaxies and knowledge that exceed our comprehension. Morrison negotiates complex ideas connecting us to nature and how we are all bound to it. The abstract works such as ‘Spore’ and ‘Camouflage’ (2008), convey ideas of networks subliminally and subtly through the filigree patterns and fluid lines and droplets of paint – discovered through observing the layering of the painting that hovers in the palimpsest of its surface. The accumulation of layers and strata drawn from careful, forensic observation – result in the lingering question of why and how things are the way they are?
The act of seeing, registering, and witnessing calls us as viewers into presence with these dynamic ecological systems. Fine lines like arterial networks, as observed in ‘Ghost Net’ (2007) branch out in rhizomatic form, creating a web of interconnections between human and other, between ways of seeing and relating to the precious and fragile ecosystems that sustain us. It is the entanglement of interwoven living and dynamic systems that Morrison explores in her work – the living alchemy of land and air, earth, and water. In this way, Morrison’s work represents a meditation on how place shapes us as much as we shape it. Whether her eye rests on Tasmania’s depleting kelp forests ‘Habitat II’ (2020), or the coastal estuaries, or the inland landscapes of her home on the North-West Coast, Morrison explores the dynamic living systems that sustain life. In so doing – Anne asks what it is to exist and inhabit this place of lutruwita/Tasmania – and by extension, the world, creating a space for an individual emotional response – eliciting a deeper knowing and understanding of environment.
In focussing on creative tensions between micro and macro landscapes, the big and the small – there resides a response to the Tasmanian environment where the dualities of closed vs open, isolated vs connected, internal vs external, us versus them begin to play out.
We live in a time where there is a distrust of human experience and the subjective, where that which cannot be quantified and measured is somehow of lesser value. Art and cultural works are an essential means to increase awareness, challenge assumptions and shift perceptions. In contrast to this viewpoint, Morrison’s paintings attempt to call us to re-inhabit and make full use of—and even celebrate in—a more responsive and responsible place within the world.
Dr Troy Ruffels
November 2021