Publication:
Artichoke (Interior/Architecture/Design/Objects/People), Spring 2009

Headline:
Tales of Space and Time
Heather and Ivan Morison take their passion for science fiction on the road

Selected editorial:

By Colin Martin

UK artists Heather and Ivan Morison make works which reflect their wide ranging interests, including horticulture, hand built timber house trucks and science fiction. At the 2007 International Art exhibition in Venice they exhibited a static structure built from timber that was felled and milled in their own arboretum in Wales, which they acquired when their work out grew their allotment garden. The structure’s design was based on a jagged shape of a piece of pyrite. They had bought it in Arizona during a US road trip when they interviewed several surviving 1970’s ‘New Age American Gypsies,’ who had pioneered an escapist, nomadic lifestyle travelling the west coast in house-trucks. The Venetian structure was inset with brightly coloured stained glass windows, widely used in Californian house-trucks.

For last year’s inaugural Folkestone Triennial on the Kent coast, the Morisons extended their interest in the itinerate into outerspace by creating a mobile science fiction library, one of the twenty-two works commissioned by international artists. Some works occupied single fixed locations; others were shown at multiple fixed sites; while the third category, which included the Morison’s van, changed location daily for three months, moving along the coast and around the town. The Morisons literally took their passion for science fiction ‘on the road’ to the delight of residents, holiday makers and art lovers.

The artists converted a 1954 Bedford Green Goddess military fire engine into a truck-library by adding a superstructure made from Douglas Fir (again sourced from their arboretum). I took shelter from the rain during a September gale at Folkestone. Inside the van, I gently steamed myself besides its potbellied stove, which a ‘librarian’ kept ablaze with logs. Cups of tea were also on offer to readers. The library was fitted out to appeal to the inner child in adults, as well as to children, with many nooks and crannies available for curling up with a book.

The most enticing piece of furniture was two single bed compartments arranged like railway couchettes, accessed via latched blue doors that swing downwards when opened. Each sleeping compartment had its own tiny window decorated with stained glass motifs such as rockets and ringed planets appropriated from space travel comic books. Curtains and furnishing fabrics used throughout the van were similarly patterned.

The library was well stocked with about 400 science fiction titles. Apparently local residents used the van regularly, reading for hours at a stretch, treating it as a welcome replacement for the town’s closed library and withdrawn mobile library service. In an intriguing link Folkestone has a connection with one of the earliest modern science fiction writers, H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine (1895) and Tales of Time and Space (1899) which the Morisons appropriated as the title for their Triennial work.

'We wanted to build our own escape vehicle' say the Morisons. 'One a bit like the time machine, which equipped its occupant with the knowledge of every imaginable future and mankind’s solutions to these problems.' Despite being stocked with apocalyptic, post- apocalyptic and catastrophic literature, their library-truck has an engagingly gentle quality, balancing their (and our) nostalgia for childhood dreams of space travel with an unfathomable.