What’s On
Exhibition
Sue Morris
W.O.W - the World Of Wonder
July 22nd to August 27th
Collecting is an essential part of my art practice. Sometimes things are held without knowing how or when they will be utilized, but knowing they have a resonance or strong personal significance. One such thing is an encyclopedia I’ve had in my possession since early childhood, a source of pictures before I could read, essential reference for school homework and projects, and carried with each relocation, from family home to college digs, city to city and across international borders.
This heavy tome is clearly of its age (the late fifties/early sixties) in content, visually and linguistically, reflecting a particular time and mindset. The promise of advancing technology in the post war/ post-colonial era, spawned a tide of naive optimism. Before the advent of photoshop and Wikepedia, its authoritative text, diagrams, illustrations and photographs are at first glance fully convincing, but on closer inspection open a world of ambiguity.
My current work is an attempt as a visual artist, to explore the territories of the real and the imagined, the explained and yet unexplainable. In a child’s mind particularly, the two often collide and overlap. By referencing the encyclopedia’s images and text, manipulating scale, colour and content, deploying its pseudo scientific style and rendering, I re-enter the vistas of childhood from an adult standpoint.
Central to the work are pairings of objects, one a counterpoint to the other, which explore notions of the perceived v the unknown, truth v illusion, authenticity v facsimile, presence and absence, science and art, public space and private space.
Significantly, I recently resumed contact with my biological father after an absence of forty years. I learned that he enrolled on a Fine Art degree course in his seventies after a lifetime of working in engineering, and that the encyclopedia belonged to him and was passed on to my sibling and I.
Wow!
Sue Morris followed her degree at Chelsea College of Art with an M.A. from the Royal College of Art, London. She moved to Ireland in the early 90’s and now lives in County Sligo.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and Ireland and has had work commissioned by, and held, in corporate, public and private collections.
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Click Here for more information on making a submission to our gallery programme.
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