In [this] project, the Morisons have created 'Pleasure Island' and 'Fantasy Island', two sculptures built from the timber of Douglas Firs, Grand Fir and Western Hemlock that were blown down in their wood in early 2007. They also incorporate panels of brightly coloured glass. Continuing their examination of crystalline forms, and also their interest in the alien, the sculptures appear to spread like cankers or growths that are both beautiful and yet repellent. Echoing the geodesic forms designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s and popularised as shelters in the 1970s, they rise up from a broad base to a kaleidoscope of colourful glass through which shafts of daylight are cast like the beam of a spaceship, illuminating the interior spaces.
So the pieces have a complicated relationship with the viewer in their refusal to be pinned down: ugly yet beautiful; organic yet man-made; utopian yet dystopian; dangerous yet a potential place of safety.
Whilst 'Pleasure Island' is built in Venice, 'Fantasy Island' is built in Coed Gwynant. The sculptures are identical and take their inspiration from a piece of Pyrite that the Morisons bought at the Quartzsite Rock and Mineral Fayre in Arizona'.
Hannah Firth, And So it Goes, exh. cat., Artists from Wales at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2007

Heather admitted that there might come a time when their art leaves their garden behind. What would take its place, I ask. "Well, you know," she says, gazing dreamily out of the greenhouse, "we'd really like an arboretum."
Morgan Falconer, Allotment Art, The Times, 22 May 2004

If you ever have the reason or opportunity to venture into the idyllic countryside of northwestern Wales, it is worthwhile making your way to a unique work of art hidden within the natural landscape there. Within their own “arboretum,” a densely wooded property on a steep incline, the artist couple Heather and Ivan Morison have constructed a wooden cabin in crystalline form called Fantasy Island. Marrying the geodesic shapes of 1970s utopian architecture and do-it-yourself handicraft, Pleasure Island is the sister structure of their installation at the Welsh Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Modeled on a rock the couple discovered while traveling in the American West, the structure is representative of the Morisons’ interests in the natural and the fantastical. Many of their works have been based on their roamings through the world’s ecosystems, and they have collected flowers in Romania, recorded bird calls in Ecuador, spent a day with an ice-fisherman near the Arctic and transplanted a Russian taiga to the town of Sheffield (see their website for an excellent collection of sound works!). Nestled into the side of a wooded hill, Fantasy Island is both a tribute to and an ironic re-examination of 1970s counter culture and its New Age outgrowth. In the structure, colored triangular windows suggest an almost sacred feeling, while a rustic wooden stove makes the cabin a warm refuge. At the same time, its craggy form suggests an alien body that has made a meteoric landing in the forest.
Beyond a celebration of utopian ideals or hippie lifestyles, the Morisons’ work pushes notions of going green and alternative culture into the realm of alternate reality, largely through their interest in the literary genre of science fiction. Not only did they title recordings of the creaking trees in their arboretum Hothouse, after the sci-fi novel by Brian Aldiss in which a single tree has colonized the planet and humans have devolved to a form of fungus, but they have even penned a science fiction novel themselves. In their willing embrace of more outrageous versions of post-human existence, they would describe themselves as apocalyptical instead of ecological artists, although their polite humor and humble activities, like gardening and felling trees, seem to locate them more firmly on the side of hope – as does their chapel-like hideaway hidden in the heart of the Welsh forest.
The Crystalline Cabin Fever of Heather and Ivan Morison, www.xymara.com, 2009

The work of Heather & Ivan Morison engages with and responds to their surroundings. They survey, record and collect to rebuild and re-present the often familiar, investing their observations and discoveries with vigourous fascination. In 2005 they acquired a wood in North Wales and they are now developing the area of mature conifers into an arboretum - a collection of trees that will be gathered from around the world. As old trees are cleared to make way for new species, they are cut into timber that is used to realise new projects, including much of their exhibition in Venice.
Whilst the Morisons examine the extraordinary beauty and detail of the natural world, they also acknowledge the presence of threat and often these two worlds come together to create a sense of disorientation. Recently, they have begun to probe further the notion of the unknown through an ongoing investigation that sees a mapping of history and the natural world, come intriguingly close to alien intent. The resultant works both disturb and embody notions of beauty derived from nature.
Hannah Firth, And So it Goes, exh. cat., Artists from Wales at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2007

Gavin Wade: I think you might have said earlier about the limits of the garden and whether you were trying to expand the limits, trying to show more of life.
Ivan Morison: There's many reasons, I think, for getting the wood and starting the arboretum. One of the things we are doing is trying to build up a mythology, but it's like a semi-fictional narrative slowly unfolding about ourselves. So the story's gradually unfolding about our lives, I guess, that's what our work is. And some of those bits are true and some are a little bit made up. The arboretum existed within our work for many years before we actually went ahead and started it, because we've talked about it a lot, about the idea of an arboretum. And that's one of those things that's actually now turning to reality. And yes it's about expanding the potential of the garden. The garden's great, it's working for us, but with gardening, you're stuck in the garden all the time, all year, it constrains you. What we wanted was a long-term project for the rest of our lives, but which then also makes us go and do other things which gives us reasons to go to places, a list of things we have to do, an itinerary for our life, we have to go and collect the trees from here and there, we have to go everywhere to get the arboretum, to complete the arboretum.
GW: Is that because of doing the tour across China and making the 'Chinese Arboretum' series, did that make you want to do that in real life?
IM: Well it did. We actually visited an arboretum in Finland and met with a guy whose grandfather had set up an arboretum, and his father was running it and then his son had taken it over, and he walked us around. And it was a combination of him and a Finnish lady that we met as well. Her garden was a collection of plants she had collected from around the world, and the plants had special significance to her family or just journeys she'd made. Wherever she went she collected plants, and she could walk around the garden and tell us about her life. And this arboretum was this guy, you know, it was almost the same, but he could tell us about his grandfather's life through, say, a patch of Siberian larches. An amazing monument to their lives.
And that's really where we started to realise that it might have more potential for us in the long-term because we felt that the garden was constraining us. And we went to work abroad for a year and during that time we couldn't work on the garden.
GW: Is there a relationship to how you might form the arboretum here in terms of how you locate the knowledge, how you choose which plant or trees or which people or which projects?
IM: Exactly. Well we're still working through how that process is going to work really because obviously you could be quite scientific about it and have like a list of trees to tick off, for example the next one on the list is in South America, so we have to go there and collect it. Or it can be a little bit more like that 'Chinese Arboretum', a little bit more natural and just people recommending us to go and find trees in this place and that place, a little bit more intuitively led, I don't know.
Heather & Ivan Morison interviewed by Gavin Wade, 'You should plant your bulbs in autumn when the wind is...', Axis, 2006

Fantasy Island
2007
Timber and glass

Commissioned for the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007

Arboretum
2005-ongoing

Coed Gwynant, Gwynedd, UK