We make assumptions based on our lived experiences. Symbolism emerges from the taught rituals created from generations of assumptions.
More often than not, those rituals are elemental in nature, be it personal:
“I use water to cleanse”; or something more polemic: “Cleanliness is godliness.” Working with the elemental materials we encounter in our daily lives, such as hair, blood, excrement, wood, clay, and beeswax, to communicate, can evoke quite a provocative experience.
Christchurch artist Julia Morison’s work intermixes the sacred and the profane. Witty and densely sexual, Morison explores existing systems of ordering and systematising form and content through her practice.
The artist’s visual expression is deliciously elemental, constructed with viscous markings and the sinew of her surroundings. She moves between a variety of media: painting, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Stylistically, a Twin Peaks aesthetic springs to mind, with a colour palette resonant with sepia, tungsten, blood, coal, and ash. Morison’s surface textures are reassuringly solid; however, the delicate veins of heritage that are present in most of her works are hard to ignore, adding a connective depth to the artist’s expression.
Morison’s use of her sources is creative, and wilfully idiosyncratic – she calls them ‘a skeleton you can spin off from’ – one of the pleasures offered by her art decades, is watching her system mutate and ramify in unpredictable ways” – curator and writer Justin Paton.
Compositionally Morison draws from Euclidian geometry, the legacies of constructivism and formal abstraction, through to interrogation and reimagining of alchemy, number symbolism and in particular the Jewish mystical tradition called ‘Kabbalah’.
In everything she produces, we can find something of ourselves; a flickered memory of a fleeting moment, the hint of an imagined scent, the taste of a tongue… The elements will do this to you.
Julia Morison ONZM celebrates four decades of work with a mini survey of her oeuvre In hindsight at Trish Clark Gallery. On from 8 October until 19 November.
142 Great North Road, Grey Lynn. More info at trishclark.co.nz
