The World of Heather & Ivan Morison
Nigel Prince

The work of Heather & Ivan Morison is at once a celebration of and a reflection on the simple pleasures. It mirrors the passion, process and beauty of the subjects and people that they meet while travelling, be they an astronomer, an ice fisherman, floristry, a beekeeper, a pig farmer, java sparrows, fungi, science fiction or wildflowers to name 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, the periphery of daily life. The incidental, the unusual, the hidden and the unforeseen, all are considered without judgement and brought together in an attempt to provide insight, to investigate the things that surround us and to shed light on our place within these things. Part documentary, part dissemination of information which attracts them with some strange fascination, the artists take delight in revealing the essence of the mundane and its particularities and peculiarities and throughout their practice have maintained specific formal and conceptual strategies as a means to manifest their observations.

One such methodology employed is their use of text. These written observations, all documented in the same restrained language and including the names and location of protagonists are transmitted via a series of differing outputs. Limited edition printed cards are mailed to an ever-growing community of contacts, LED displays such as the one commissioned at IPS throughout 2003-04 are utilised and a series of editioned newspaper announcements were made during their travels in Lithuania, Finland and Mongolia during 2003. Since 2001 when they first took on Garden 114 in Edgbaston, Birmingham, cards were posted out to inform recipients of details observed in their leisure garden. Some described the success and failure of various plants and vegetables that grow there; others recorded activities to cultivate the land and others simply but evocatively consisted of lists documenting birds seen, colours emerging. Into open public space, the texts inserted a moment of private observation, sometimes acting like a pause, prompting a quiet personal reflection or an associative memory. The messages acted as a kind of reportage, a strange journalism evoking similarity and difference.

As their practice evolved, so too has their use of this device. No longer exclusively about the garden, announcements through various media have extended their practice and observations to embrace a truly all-encompassing perspective. Occasionally implicating themselves into some foreign scenario in which they were at once a part of and apart from, the Morison’s suggested their personal frustrations with or immersion into the daily routines they observed during their research residency of Global Survey. At times the images and events they conjured operated at a detached distance, all the time being presented in the same calm, matter-of-fact language regardless of mode of realisation. One such text sent to the LED at IPS stated, "Jonas Klimas is confused. Why has he woken up lying in the road? Sv. Mikalojaus, Vilnius, Lithuania". The content of these LED texts ranged from the tragi-comic to the light-hearted but all wove a quasi-fiction of global events and daily life, the incidental of the everyday raised to a status of potential profundity. As their travels progressed through Scandinavia to the Baltic States and onward through Siberia, China and Mongolia, so the tone and observations changed. From the magical to the almost murderously erotic, events somehow seemed bleaker, tougher or even surreal as if the changing physical conditions these people endured were echoed by behavioural patterns. A card posted to their entire mailing list from China and that of the Charles H Scott Gallery in Vancouver, was "Chinese citizen Zhou Peikun and his wife have been breeding pigs for many years. Tonight he will stab her twice, attend to the swine and then strangle himself with a silk thread. The couple had no other occupation. Songinskhairkhan district, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia". An earlier alternative version of this text had appeared in The UB Post, Mongolia’s most popular English language newspaper. In August 2003 Ivan and Heather Morison had the story published on the front page. The headline ran "Chinese man stabs wife", and the text reproduced read, "A CHINESE citizen living in the Songinokhairkhan district strangled himself with a silk thread after killing his wife on July 30. The 45-year-old Chinese woman was stabbed twice by her 52-year-old husband. The couple had been living in Mongolia for many years breeding pigs. They didn't have any other occupation. The police of the district, who found a two-page letter in Chinese, are investigating the case." When a related series of texts unfolded the narrative across the LED display in Birmingham, a tangible sense of tension and compelling repulsion kept viewers anxiously waiting for its strangely erotic dénouement. These continuing portraits assumed a new and different kind of significance as they were plucked from their context and represented in another part of the world ­ small fantastic pictures within a much larger system or network. The evocation of other stories made one wonder about what other events were happening that had been missed or had somehow been filtered out for some reason. Maybe these stories would emerge in a different format, at a different time. And one also wonders where the art emerges within such strategies, so ambiguous and carefully poised is their insertion in our everyday world.

A second and concurrent device utilised is the relationship and delight in colour. As a method it is adopted as a means to reveal further layers of meaning to their works and to inject a sense of formal ordering or cataloguing to potentially disparate information. This was first encountered in 2001 in the slide projection and colour chart work, Colours in Ivan Morison’s garden, summer 2001 (Spectrum #1). Other versions of this have been elaborated through two printed cards and DVD projections. The cards listed the colours present in the garden during the summers of 2001 and 2002 and the accompanying DVD, Colours and Sounds in Ivan Morison’s garden, spring 2002, presented a foreground of wildflowers gently stirring in the breeze while a naked figure of ‘Ivan Morison, Head Gardener’, beckoned us to join him in the pastoral idyll. Such a strategy has been used again in further works, most recently at Shrewsbury where a spectrum of coloured polythene shopping bags, some local, others from their overseas travels, were sited high up, caught as if by accident in the branches of the thirteen trees which encircle the gallery. Spectrum #3 moved progressively from scarlet, through yellows to greens and blues as visitors walked around the building and created a sense of magical transformation from something modestly everyday and humble. A similar journey also used a colour wheel to structure a work where Science fiction reference bookcase (in colour order) presented all the key science-fiction novels the Morisons should have read as research toward their own novel, The Divine Vessel. This collection, bought since writing their novella, contextualised the Morison’s contact with people they met ­ like aliens they too were simultaneously a part of other people’s lives but also at one remove. On this occasion, a shelf high on a gallery wall contained these key texts bought as they travelled their spines arranged left to right according to the rainbow from red to violet. Original and ongoing slide sequences of wildflowers discovered or hunted out either in their garden or in various countries they have travelled to, similarly document with a deceptively straightforward manner the beauty and delight of this naturally occurring palette. This use of colour spectrums has also found its way into work with the Royal Horticultural Society’s colours for flowers and for 2004 in spring and summer bedding schemes produced for the city of Westminster in London.

Such demonstrations of this have been taken further by other works such as Ivan Morison created some fantastic displays during his career as a florist... (2003) and more recently by a series of photographic still-life arrangements of flora and fauna. The former was a restored Covent Garden flower barrow which played with notions of what is apparently there and yet simultaneously of something else. The work was both a part of and apart from the routines it referenced and mirrored the activities observed that we apprehend in our daily existence that somehow go unnoticed. It revealed, elaborated and heightened the qualities present in the most ordinary of regular tasks. Daily flower selections and combinations on a costermonger’s stall were sold and arranged to progressively move through painterly colour relationships and spectrums. Invention with materials and such exchanges go beyond that which is familiar to us all and yet its recontextualisation as part of a gallery programme and subtle but considered display framed the conventional and everyday operation in a new light. Ivan & Heather fully immersing themselves in the world of floristry, building up close links with the wholesalers and growers, visiting the auctions in Holland and having professional training in floristry extended the understanding of the work. From the stall beginning as something merely aesthetic they developed the project into a fully functioning self-supporting business with four trained staff and regular customers. As such it provides an example of their mirroring of the processes and curiosity to share the knowledge, energy and commitment of the amateur enthusiasts and various individuals they meet.

The Still Lifes series such as Still Life with Flowers or Still Life with Fishes, relate to the historical notion of the vanitas where objects are brought together to remind us of the often fragile and tenuous state of existence. Alongside these sumptuous images, which in many ways revel in the drama of colour, light and shadow with clear historical precedents, are presented details as abstractions. These, by mirroring a process of scientific magnification as if to uncover some other reality or provide enlightenment for an unknown world reveals not a putrid, diseased, rotting mess but washes of brilliant sensual colour. Such beauty among the unexpected or unforeseen here is revealed by images but shares its sensibility with their multi-various text manifestations.

A strong feel for the documentary is present in their practice. As well as in the cards this is presented in series of audio works, photographs, video pieces and objects some of which reveal their interest in retrieving local lost histories, others reflect or collect objects, sightings and scenes they encounter. In Chinese Arboretum, the artists demonstrate the compulsion of fanatics, travelling thousands of miles to record a single tree. During the summer and autumn of 2003 Heather & Ivan Morison travelled extensively throughout China photographing trees of merit with an old second-hand medium format Chinese camera. A selection of one hundred of the images taken make up the ongoing billboard project Chinese Arboretum, where they are gradually finding outdoor public billboard sites to display the images of trees. As well as Chinese Arboretum, an edited selection being projected as a medium format slide sequence, two separate locations in Sheffield were selected for large-scale billboard images throughout August 2004. In their titling, these works connect the process of the Morison’s own journey to locate the tree with the life of an individual living nearby. Hence for example No. 24 is titled Zao Wou Ki watches the old man flying his kite from the footbridge above the ring road. That must be a thousand meters high he thinks.

Collections of audio pieces are sourced as data and then transformed into new documents of portraits of particular places and individuals met. A series of eight weekly half-hour radio programmes were produced for Resonance 104.4 FM and titled Still Life. These comprised of a collection of unimportant, unusual and pleasurable conversations and collected sounds that reflect the beauty of their subjects. Examples are Still Life #1 a programme recording the passions of an astronomer and an ornithologist and Still Life #4, a collection of sounds recorded during a long slow journey from European Russia, through Siberia and Mongolia to China. Edited versions of other interviews and recordings made were produced as a limited-edition white label vinyl LP and included conversations that took place in Finland and New Zealand whilst fly fishing, star gazing, beekeeping, ice fishing and bird watching. The B-side of this LP brought together the Swedish Kihlberg family’s annual Christmas song collection, which included their own renditions of things such as ‘O Helga natt’ and ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’.

Documentation of events they have witnessed is materialised through other processes too. Often rather than being recorded by text, photographic means or audio, such things are re-enacted in some way. Remaking goes beyond mere replication to become a different kind of reporting back. Things are held up for scrutiny with the same inquisitive and curious nature of the amateur enthusiasts they meet. It is almost as if by remaking an event then some new light might be shone to reveal or illuminate. It also allows for other narratives to emerge or for plays and conflations of fact and fiction to occur. Such pieces often take many forms. The video work Re-enactment ‘Lai Bai has fixed his tricycle to go forwards as he peddles backwards. This’ll fox them he thinks. Pingyau, China.’ shows Heather riding a bicycle past a familiar civic statue of Hercules alongside the River Severn in a Shrewsbury park. Onlookers do a double take as she glides past moving forward but peddling backwards. This re-enactment of an event they saw in China is doubly layered in its reading by the bicycle in the projection being one that was dismantled and then shipped back from China once they had left there for New Zealand in October 2004. The potential meanings of this piece becomes further entwined once considered in relation to the double DVD projection Phoenix ‘Please take my bicycle apart. I want to post it to England' and Phoenix ‘Please put my bicycle back together again, and fix it to go forwards when I peddle backwards’. In this, one screen shows the dismantling in a suburban yard in Peking and the other its reassembly and doctoring in a repair shop in Shrewsbury prior to being used for the production of the video. Stories intertwine and new narratives emerge or are piled one on top of the other to create alternative levels of meaning.

Akademgorodok is an edition of 500 books entitled One day in the summer of 2003 Heather and Ivan Morison hired an aeroplane to write the name of their favourite brand of Russian ice cream, 'Inmarko', in the sky above Akademgorodok. They wrote this book to document the event. The 94-page book is written in English and Russian and was originally only available to buy from the security guard Boris Dotsenko at Kirov House of Culture, Novosibirsk, and Russia. Now it is also available for purchase from Ikon Gallery bookshop in Birmingham. It is a fiction written by Heather & Ivan Morison whilst they lived in Akademgorodok, the town of science, in Siberia, Russia, during the summer of 2003. It documents the artistic intervention that they made above the town, mentioned in the title of the work, through the lives of some of its inhabitants. The structure of this piece narrates a sequence of discreet events all linked by the activity of the aeroplane flying overhead and thus re-enacts an event in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Although these activities all happen simultaneously, they are in different parts of the city. This book in itself becomes a further re-enactment when for New Art Gallery Walsall, it was transformed and became Heather & Ivan Morison hired an aeroplane to write the name of their favourite brand of Russian ice cream, ‘NHMAPKO’*, in the sky above Akademgorodok, the town of science, Siberia, Russia. * Translators note: ‘NHMAPKO’ is pronounced ‘Inmarko’. A signwriter was employed to write seven texts, one per week for the duration of the exhibition. This feat in itself became a spectacle, taking place as it did in the Window Gallery facing out into the busy shopping centre High street. This performative piece links further with other strategies within their practice as each text was painted on a different coloured ground which referenced a colour described in the text and hence gave structure to the sequence of individual texts and built a sense of narrative integration.

Other events become remade as means to establish or echo former activities involving community. These remind us of the original magic that perhaps caught the Morison’s eye. For Sheffield a kite flying event, I put you on a mile-long string but still you broke away was organised in Meersbrook Park, which brought together twelve families from across all generations of this Yorkshire city’s Chinese community. The sight of all individuals rapt enjoyment and enthralment in the multi-coloured kites zigzagging across the sky and hillside provided a visual and communal scene of simple and direct pleasure. Here the dynamic relationship with ‘audience’ mirrors back their modus operandi ­ all things have potential to be valued. All things are seen with freshness and from an unjaded viewpoint, as if apprehended for the first time.

So it is that Heather & Ivan Morison engage with the world. The beauty of banal detail attracts them as they record and illuminate the mundane that is their stock in trade. By floating like a cumulus cloud directed and prompted by the people they meet, they become fascinated watchers reporting back the observations and events they encounter with a mixture of humour and innocent awe. The peripheries of our world become celebrated, raised to scrutiny and unleashed with energy and momentum. There is an unnerving sense of accuracy and detail with which they document happenings and collect thoughts and scenes, which conjure images in ones’ mind as vivid as the sights they see. With an apparent casualness that is emblematic in their work, they simultaneously broadcast things that are ordinary and yet loaded with meaning, that are utterly simple yet endlessly complex. And at once there is also doubt as to the veracity of their texts and messages from afar. The clear mischievous or menacing tone at times makes one consider ones’ role as a part in some potential hoax and yet it is one in which we are happy to join given the nature of the wonder, horror, fun and pathos that is communicated. And so their journey continues: their subjects commonplace and reported back almost as a hobby rather than a job. They see beyond what is there, the sense of the everyday, to touch upon something that is seemingly mundane yet mysterious or loaded. With a neutral gaze they wait for things to unfold and then present them, there in an unblinking state, awaiting our reception.

Foundation and Empire, Article Press, 2004