2012, Installation Hepworth Wakefield         


Anna



This body of work by Heather and Ivan Morison draws on the life and works of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan (1901-1968). Kavan, born Helen Ferguson, produced a large body of elusive and strange work that operated somewhere between biography and science fiction, drawing on her own turbulent life.

Anna is an allegorical piece of object theatre that tells a brutal tale of love and loss set against the approaching threat of ‘the ice’. The story is presented through the objects in the gallery and the voices of the three narrators: the child, the girl and the warden. Anna, the mother of the child, ‘is the purest of ideas’, a form made from white chalk and bone. She meets a man, who is transformed into ‘the warden’ by fire, blackened and burnt in a war in which Anna loses her child. Each character, event and experience is represented by an object: Anna’s loss by an unlit candle; Anna and the warden’s broken love by a mended, leaking jug; the child by a floating dominant, sun-like sphere.

Anna considers our understanding of the world through myth, and how meaning comes to us through storytelling. It draws on the inherent symbolism of objects, their existing associations and their potential for new meaning. Set within The Hepworth Wakefield these objects speak of not only of the fate of Anna’s world but that of our own.


Photographers’ credits       


All images_ Ivan Morison

Love Me or Leave Me Alone        

Publication



Love Me or Leave Me Alone, The Very Public Art of Heather Peak and Ivan Morison presents a journey through the past decade and a half of the artists’ practice, with an emphasis on their pavilions, escape vehicles, and public artworks.  The book can be ordered from the publishers Art/Books
Press contact        


If you can’t find the information you are looking for you can contact the studio of Heather Peak and Ivan Morison here: studio@peakmorison.org