The press of Heather & Ivan Morison

Publication:
Frieze, Issue 69 (September 2002)

Headline:
"Outwardbound. Norwich Gallery"
"As well as manning his lucrative greengrocer’s stall, Morison has produced a series of drawings of failed cabbages".

Picture:
By Ivan Morison

Caption:
"During Ivan Morison’s brief career as a Fruit and Vegetable Vendor... 2002. Fruit and vegetable stall"

Selected editorial:

"By Matt Price.

'Ivan Morison is disappointed with his crop to Red Flare Cabbages. Suffering from slug attack, poor soil and a shaded position, they never stood a chance. This year Ivan is attempting to grow giant marrows.’ So reads one of Morison’s information cards, which keep the interested up to date on the progress of his allotment in the genteel surroundings of Westbourne Road Leisure Gardens in Edgbaston. En route for Norwich Gallery, therefore, it was not surprising to stumble across Morison standing behind a rather stunning fruit and veg stall, exchanging tips for cooking asparagus with a passing customer. Growing, literally, from his recent exploration of the lexicon of horticulture, Morison’s new work has moved away from the installation to more site-specific sculptural and performance-based works, first signalled by his primrose project at Transit at the start of the year and most recently at the Ikon Gallery, where he presented footage of himself strolling naked around his allotment looking like a figure in a painting by Puvis de Chavannes, while outside he sold flowers from a stall. In addition to manning his surprisingly lucrative greengrocer’s stall, he has also produced a series of patiently but not obsessively rendered drawings on graph paper of these aforementioned failed cabbages, making the root systems appear like indecipherable data and the leaves like flamboyant statistics...

'Outwardbound' was a strangely disjointed exhibition, but perhaps this was its charm. A common thread running through the assembled works was a sense of untroubled dislocation and a gently pathetic anomie, tempered by a faint glimmer of hope, the merest hint of optimism and just a vague promise of eventually getting somewhere else and actually doing something productive in the outside world."