- John O’Donohue[1]
An excited curiosity and exploration of imaginative play runs through John O Donohue’s meditations on the imagination and its relationship to form in a work of art. This is a fervent, giddy intoxication with the malleability of everyday phenomena when they are filtered through the fecund landscape of the mind, the imagination, the half-glimpsed wide-eyed wonder of the artistic eye. Dublin artist Rory Morris (b.1981) is an artist who glimpses this invisible quality in the essential and constant materials of commonplace objects. He seems to scratch at an intriguing aesthetic, grappling towards a beauty hidden within objects usually viewed purely through the prism of their functional merits.
Currently in his final year art course at Whitehall College of Further Education in Dublin City, Morris was interested in art from an early age, finding satisfaction in fine pen and ink illustrations. Comic books were the motivation for what was often laborious and detailed work. Having started a career as a graphic designer, Morris withheld from applying to an Art college out of apprehension. The loss of two family members fixed with a new engagement with the finite quality of life, led Morris to finally leave his job to pursue a career as a full-time artist. A self-styled explorer and reactor, Morris work seeks to retrieve and (re)present the aesthetic of the everyday, documenting and responding to transient, commonplace (and often perceived as inconsequential) materials. He does not work within one specific medium or specific genre; instead he remains open to the potentiality of a diverse ever-evolving practice. Currently his worked is based in a combination of mixed media and print, but he also works in paint and sculpture.
What attracts him to print is the uncontrollable quality of the medium, those marks made by the plate and ink that cannot be anticipated. While there is an element of control, chance also has a significant role in producing the final form of the work. Within mixed media there is an engagement with those things that are self-descriptive of their function through the familiarity of their physical forms. So, feathers by their weight and texture are useful in implying softness; rocks, by their nature, hardness; and so, these qualities lend themselves well to graphic descriptions. His work finds inspiration in found objects; intrigued by their possible antiquity and unique composition, an idea for the canvas often finds its genesis in the arbitrary. As Morris says, ‘You can find aesthetics in a pile of rubbish, a crack in the pavement (…) or even in a mortgage receipt’. It is through these found objects that the artist’s personality and narrative surfaces. Having discovered a box of the aforementioned mortgage receipts in his parent’s attic, Morris hopes to use these found papers in a future work. An old mortgage receipt, fragile in its physicality but valuable in its representation of toil and achievement, serve as reference points from which Morris draws upon the power and ubiquity of that which we find in everyday ephemera, while at the same time exploring and touching his own uniquely personal family histories. He points to the antiquity, memorial and physical aspects of the material, and explains that in using these old crumpled papers it presents a rawness and viscerality that no paint can imitate.
While he reassures me that the motives and ideas underlying all of his work stem from an organic place of memory and experience, the end result of his engagement with objects often ends up appearing like a conceptual or abstract meditation. His experiments with various materials often pair distinct and unlikely phenomena; he then documents their dialogue through photography, investigating the fluctuating tension and permutations through which the materials push against one another and evolve. The end results of such experiments are often unknown to Morris, but he is also strict with their completion if they deviate too far from his perceived end result. He is thus both controlled and lenient enough in the working process to allow for the unpredictably of the materials to work themselves into pattern.
His ongoing series involving chairs is the best example of this process of contrast and control, the dialogue between the natural and the ready-made. Having frozen a black chair in a block of ice, Morris charts the disruption of the object, the violent snapping of the wood as a result of expansion and melting. He documents the corrosion of man-made functional objects by elemental forces beyond our control, an introduction of the elemental to the functional, capturing the unpredictable and mutating forms which emerge. In this particular piece of work, the crude form of the ice slowly gives way to a beautiful contrast of black, arching lines set against white billowing forms. The photographs display an accumulation of soft and hard, tough and momentarily unrecognisable forms, forms which are fragmenting, unravelling, splintering, erupting, disintegrating, wilting and fracturing around one another, a visual poem of mutability and elegant destruction.
One might ask, “Why chairs?” Morris explains, ‘I often substitute people, memories and feelings for objects.’ And like the uniqueness of an individual’s personality, the chosen material often dictates its own path to completion. Chairs, those ever present, intrinsically utilitarian items, are consummate human objects. When chairs are visible they represent the presence of people, indicative of the way objects are imbued with meaning and history required through everyday use. The Colombian born artist Doris Salcedo works in a similar fashion, taking objects imbued with history and politicising it or using it to dismantle or reignite memories of a forgotten event. The friction between control and chance, between abstract and firm meanings, is a tension that Morris explores throughout the working process. The object belongs in a simplified plane, as the catalyst for where the journey begins and ends. Morris is intrigued by Chance Art and the intangibility of the works of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, whose art is susceptible to temporal change. Goldsworthy uses materials from nature such as twigs, leaves, and snow, through which the finished work is often absorbed back into that from which it came.
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| Common Interest |
An element of ambiguity and the unanticipated lingers over the work and character of Morris’ objects and photographs. But there remains something perpetually inviting about the work. There is a salute to the melting away of time embedded in the photographs of the chairs whose dense matter eventually succumbs to the pressures of their icy grip. There is an ethereal quality to his work with mechanical cogs which have succumbed to some vapour-like, hazy orbit in space. The solidity of his chosen objects, chairs, cogs and wood, always seemingly dark and sharp edged, coupled with elemental energies, encourages the viewer to reconfigure their binary perceptions of the natural and man-made, hard and soft, light and dark. The everyday, concrete material is re-imagined as an abstract mausoleum of fragility when exposed to the various workings of the elements. The liveliness and space surrounding the familiar material become as important as the liveliness and space occupied within. Our journey starts with tangible objects and personal experiences which, taken into the care of the artist, travels between the space of transmutation and out the other side, into a realm of disfigured and eloquent elements. This process cannot detract from the gracefulness of a considered intervention in the dialogue between Morris’ carefully chosen materials. The care of craft and the detail afforded the framing and positioning of the piece is of the utmost importance to the artist. It is this dance between the material and the ephemeral, the controlled and the unpredictable, the predestined and the chance encounter, the mundane and the sublime, the unnoticed quotidian and the eternal unknown, which characterises life, art, imagination, creation, and the fascinating work of Rory Morris.
You can view Rory Morris’ work at the end of year exhibition in Aras Chluain Tarbh (GAA Club) Clontarf on June 22-24
Rory will be attending NCAD in the autumn of 2012
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