Artists/Heather & Ivan Morison
Heather Peak was born in Desborough, UK in 1973 and Ivan Morison was born in Nottingham, UK in 1974. They are based in Arthog, North West Wales. Their work has been exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including Tate Britain; the British Art Show 6 and at the Barbican among many others. In 2007 they represented Wales at the Venice Biennale. The curator, Bruce Haines, wrote at the time: “The Morisons’ artworks focus on our spatial relationships with ordinary things, things forgotten and unnoticed, and convey the simple pleasures and passions of their endeavours and of those they meet. The formal outcomes of their investigations have included LED displays of text messages, slide shows, LP recordings of conversations, radio broadcasts, special one-off events and science-fiction novels written whilst in transit. Many of these blend factual recall with fictionalisation, merging information into a shifting narrative that builds on the mythology of Heather and Ivan Morison’s lives and the lives of the people they encounter.
Their work mirrors the passion, process and beauty of their subjects whether an astronomer, an ice fisherman, a florist or a beekeeper, to name but a few. They observe and collect the things they come into contact with, embracing chance encounters and seeking out subjects which are on the edge of daily life. The everyday and the incidental, the unusual, the hidden and the unforeseen, all are considered and brought together in an investigation of the things that surround us and to shed light on our place within these things. The artists take delight in revealing the essence of the mundane and its particularities and peculiarities.”
Work/
Work/Heather & Ivan Morison
The Black Cloud (2009)
Timber
Victoria Park, Bristol, UK
Commissioned by Situations at the University of the West of England
(built in collaboration with architect graduate Alex Sash Reading)
Of this commission, the curator Katie Daley-Yates, wrote: "The structure was designed in readiness for a future boiling Bristol, baked dry by a relentless burning sun. The Black Cloud was informed by vernacular architecture built to withstand extreme environmental conditions, with the Yakisugi treatment of the timbers creating a scorched, protective shield."
Work/Heather & Ivan Morison
Kind, Wise and Loving (2008)
Mylar and carbon fibre
230 x 200 x 335cm
The Opposite of All Those Things (2008)
Ripstop fabric and carbon fibre
263 x 330 x 440cm
Installation: Mythologies,
Haunch of Venison, London, 2009
Photo: Peter Mallet
Work/Heather & Ivan Morison
Journée des Barricades (2008)
Various industrial and domestic items
800 x 2100 x 1000cm
Commissioned by Litmus Research Initiative, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, for One Day Sculpture
Photo: Stephen Rowe
"...Their most recent project, with its direct allusion to the Parisian revolutionary barricades, also references the blockades of more recent protest and warfare as well as forming a post-apocalyptic image that suggests some “climatic disaster.” Such artwork, which takes on the role of playing between past, present and future histories not only elicits an aesthetic charge within the civic realm, but could also feasibly harness public and private performances...
The monumental installation “made up from the detritus of Wellington” inhabited and bifurcated Stout Street, which provided an ideal urban frame for viewing the sight from Lambton Quay. A colossal mass of inorganic rubbish borrowed from local recyclers and the dump, it was formed from abandoned vehicles, tyres, compacted plastic, household appliances, bicycles, supermarket trolleys and – on closer inspection – garden and domestic objects, including a host of children’s toys. It seemed as if Wellington had violently disgorged its suburban contents only to be washed up onto the city’s original shoreline, now 250 metres from the existing waterfront. Passers-by were drawn towards this massive spill, which somehow made sense of Ruamoko (1998), the Hotere/McFarlane sculpture standing in the foreground. Like Ruamoko – composed of pillars and letters from the State Insurance Building that once occupied the corner site – this behemoth was formed from salvaged materials. However, unlike the smaller public artwork, the wall of rubbish was designed to inhabit the street for a single day; from its construction, which began at midnight on Saturday, to its total disassembly and dispersal 24 hours later: hence Journée des Barricades – The Day of Barricades...
The paradox of the Morisons’ project is that, despite its associations with political resistance (involving radical, hostile or unexpected manoeuvres), the erection of the barricade engaged in neither spontaneous nor furtive action. Theirs was a carefully planned installation that required exhaustive negotiations with the authorities in order to close off a city street, erect a blockade and comply with health and safety issues – all with minimal disruption to the city’s traffic and negligible damage to its urban fabric. This pacified both the object (and its objective), rendering it monumental, sculptural and totalising rather than durational, subversive or communal. The giant barricade – perspectivally framed by some of the most European buildings in Wellington – also resembled a scenic backdrop. Cleared of parked cars, Stout Street became a picturesque space that drew the public in from Lambton Quay towards the artwork. But once you approached the spectacular assemblage, you realised that physical engagement with it was restricted, other than to look and marvel at its epic scale or enjoy the carefully arranged objects within objects – the most delightful being a collection of toys staring out at you from the dashboard of a van. Discretely placed stewards appeared (like museum docents) to prevent people from rummaging through its contents, scrambling up its precipitous structure or even climbing the rusty ladder left invitingly against the back of a battered vehicle. Nevertheless moments occurred where the barricade was breached to the delight of onlookers who tended to stand back and capture it on camera...
The potency of Journée des Barricades lay in its scenic splendour as a sculpture that fleetingly linked the theatrical and the quotidian with the catastrophic. Confronting the public with an image that suggests some sort of epic failure (social, political or ecological) recalls Walter Benjamin’s conflation of the “moment of enchantment” with the “figure of shock.” Coming across a barricade constructed of refuse indexes the ground on which its stands – reclaimed land constructed over a century ago from barricades of refuse – reminding us that we occupy despoiled shores. It also affirms Victor Burgin’s statement that art itself could be considered a “form of ecological pollution.” Although the barricade was more object than action, returning the sculpture’s contents to the dump and recyclers from which it was borrowed still positions the artwork as a fleeting event: a transitory performance that leaves its traces only in the minds of those who witnessed it as well as in the archival documentation and articles such as this one.
Dorita Hannah, Constructing the Barricade – an urban performance building between the archive and the repertoire (excepts from), critical response to Journée des Barricades, 2009
Work/Heather & Ivan Morison
"I am so sorry. Goodbye" installed outside the Barbican, London.
Part of the exhibition Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009
19 June –18 October 2009
This work explores the relationship between the built environment and nature. The double-domed pavilion takes its inspiration from the structures built by utopian communities in the west coast of the US in the 1970s. Designed as a tea house, "I am so sorry. Goodbye" provides a place of rest and shelter, where one is served hibiscus tea, a beverage popular in various parts of the world and thought to have medicinal properties. A transparent dome at the top of the structure alludes to a spaceship or futuristic aircraft, a vehicle which might transport one away from a time or place of catastrophe.