The Passionate Transitory

‘The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge… It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility needed for our journey. In this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.’

- 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.

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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[1] O’Donohue, J. The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature, (London: Transworld Ireland, 2010)

Paper Weight

I appear to be going through a bit of a phase with the sculpture that I am indulging in at the moment. The aesthetic that is capturing my imagination at the moment are those works which seem ephemeral, not solid, neutral, not garish and provoke the onlooker into believing that they have involuntarily formed themselves.  In the same vein of  Sema Bekirovic’s dice sculpture which I previously wrote about, the sculptural works of New York born artist Mia Pearlman are as delicate as they are overpowering. Like the swirling weather systems that they invoke, these structures, when installed within the gallery space last only the duration of the exhibition. This is partly due to the materials comprising of paper but it is also an informed decision on the part of the artist. Here is what the artist says about the work,

‘I make site-specific cut paper installations, ephemeral drawings in both two and three dimensions that blur the line between actual, illusionistic and imagined space. Sculptural and often glowing with natural or artificial light, these imaginary weather systems appear frozen in an ambiguous moment, bursting through walls and windows, or hovering within a room.

My process is very intuitive, based on spontaneous decisions in the moment. I begin by making loose line drawings in India ink on large rolls of paper. Then I cut out selected areas between the lines to make a new drawing in positive and negative space on the reverse. 30-80 of these cut paper pieces form the final installation, which I create on site by trial and error, a 2-3 day dance with chance and control. Existing only for the length of an exhibition, this weightless world totters on the brink of being and not being, continually in flux. It is my mediation on creation, destruction, and the transient nature of reality’

My presentation on Sema Bekirovic

I have chosen to present on a piece by the Dutch artist Sema Bekirovic. She is an artist that works in photography, videos and installations. The piece I have chosen is an untitled sculpture known as the dice structure (2008-2010).

I was immediately drawn to this piece the moment I encountered it, and while I would have previously considered myself to not be a major appreciator of sculpture I set myself the task of figuring  out why I was so charmed by the piece.

Looking at the piece I noted my initial reaction to it. It looks like some sort of free floating entity, something organic which has formed its structure without crafted intervention. It veers off to the right like it is about to break free of some invisible weight that is holding it back and it feels changeable, almost alive. It is both delicate and equally strong, not unlike a puff of smoke, a cloud or something more menacing, a tornado, a swarm of white insects, an explosion. Up-close it made me think of molecular structures, DNA, that which is imbedded in our biology. So equally the piece brought me to think about unpredictable forms about man and about nature.  Impressive for a nameless, blank intricate pattern, floating in space.

Upon a closer look at the materials used for the piece my thoughts upon the predictable and the unpredictable expanded. The sculpture was created with manufactured dice that have come straight from the factory where they were built. The dice are still unvarnished, still fused together and haven’t had their spots painted on yet. Dice of course represent chance, and risk. The unknown and unpredictable element in happenings that seems to have no assignable cause.  A force assumed to cause events that cannot be foreseen or controlled; a risk; gamble. These ideas manifest in the structure and unpredictability of the piece and so is no coincidence that dice are used in the creation of the sculpture. This material compliments the metaphorical intentions of the piece beautifully.

 It is no mistake that the piece can be read as being similar to molecular structures as much as to natural occurring phenomena in nature. Theories of chance also come up in many scientific fields such as chaos theory, probability theory and quantum mechanics. The Japanese theoretical population geneticist Motoo Kimura emphasises the role of indeterminism or chance in evolution. He developed a theory known as the neutral theory of molecular evolution which states that  at the molecular level most evolutionary change is caused by random drift of gene mutants that are equivalent in the face of selection and this does not detract from Darwin’s theory of natural selection. And so it seem that everything right down to the evolutionary process of genes might just be governed by casual means

This is just some food for thought and without getting too far off course on returning to a visual encounter with the piece, I saw something else. While we recognise this mass as a collection of attached dice, they are not yet dice. We have not yet named its purpose and assumed its role.  They have been robbed of their function and meaning because they are still fused together and unusable. It reminded me of a quote from a letter Dali wrote to his friend and supposed lover the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca,

The minute-hands of a clock (...) begin to have real value at the moment they stop pointing out the hours and, losing their circular rhythm and the arbitrary role our intelligence has subjected them to (pointing out the hours they evade the clock entirely and occupy the place that would correspond to the sex organs of little breadcrumbs

The object liberated from its function to be experienced as pure phenomenon. It cannot be called a specific thing because it is pattern. It is not fitted for one specific purpose because it hasn’t been named.  The object is liberated from control and the intention it was initially created for (dice to be used in gambling, gaming, divination, predictions and so on.) It is said of Bekirovic’s work that she creates situations in which things can occur or happen spontaneously, and letting chance decide how the work will develop, she presents nature as something beyond control - that which we try so hard to control. That process is clear in the dice sculpture

Regarding the immediate space it occupies in the gallery, it completely inhabits its surroundings and the piece draws you towards it. It feels like you already know what it is or could mean. You recognise its arrangement and you are familiar with it.  You can see this pattern or variations of it in clouds, bird formations, termite mounds, and under microscopes in laboratories and in the DNA of organisms. This rooted familiarity allows the viewer of the work to share a comfortable relation with the work, and at the same time this is an abstract piece, so why do I feel so comfortable.

I think the work is successful in allowing a confrontation between the tension that exists between an unwillingness to attribute life as we know it to theories of chaos and at the same time the seductiveness of the idea that everything might be governed by chance. The artists decision through most of her work to date  to not exert total control over the outcome of the work is central to its success as a meditation on mans tense relationship between the desire to understand and assert control over nature while leaving enough room for the necessity of chaotic elements. This is the most important understanding of the work. The fact that there is a lack of a title, a lack of coherent form of creation and a lack of a stable form is indicative of the refusal of the artist and the work to affirm or deny anything. The evading of a definition leads to the opening of possibility.’ Arthur Miller once said

 [T]here’s too much of an attempt... to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.

The decision was to not create an overtly politicised artwork and we know from the artist herself she deals with unpredictability and the tension between nature and culture. This tension through the pieces haphazard form is somewhat counter to the idea of what might be seen as the most stable and controlled medium that is sculpture. The refusal to blatantly dogmatise/politicise an artwork is liberation for the creator who feels that they don’t have to directly communicate a message. At the same time a refusal to politicise your art can result in various conflicting interpretations of what your work is. This can lead to the artists work propagating views which may not necessarily be their own. This loss of agency on the part of the artist can be correlated to the lack of agency exhibited by Bekirovic in the construction of this piece and much of her other work (she interferes as little as possible). Thus the artwork becomes a blank page to be written upon by others - though the artist might not agree with the conclusions drawn by viewers; this precarious relationship is itself a manifestation of the chance and unpredictability that infuses the work itself.
For a clean crisp white object to present such musings on man, nature, science and chance is in my opinion the greatest accomplishment of the work