Publication:
Landscape Architecture Australia, November 2007

Headline:
And So It Goes

Selected editorial:

By Colin Martin

It's hard to decide what to see at the Venice Biennale, when confronted by acres of international contemporary art. Two short sentences printed on a cotton carrier bag - "I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same" - provided an intriguing incentive to visit And so it goes: Artists from Wales. Staged in a former brewery on Giudecca, the Welsh show included work by Richard Deacon, Merlin James, and Heather and Ivan Morison. The Morisons' collaborative work was familiar from Art of the Garden, a 2004 exhibition about the relationship between art and gardening. It included Garden 114 (2001-2003), their series of twelve postcards reporting progress at their allotment garden in Birmingham. "Ivan is happy with the slow, but steady, growth of his Green globe artichokes and is encouraging his Cantaloup melons, whose progress is far behind the others" is a typical extract, evoking Charles Pooter in Diary of Nobody.

After contacting the artists, I received printed cards about their artistic projects. An enigmatic message from Quartzsite, Arizona, arrived earlier this year, with a Venetian postmark. "Mr & Mrs Ivan Morison think they have found a meteorite. Holding it tight in their hands they think they can feel it pulsing." All was revealed at the [Welsh Pavilion], where the framed printed card was displayed alongside their slide and sound installation Dark Star. The works document their recent US trip, finding and interviewing surviving 1970's "New Age American Gypsies," who travelled the west coast in hand-built timber house-trucks. "I don't own land - but at least I can buy an old truck and build a cabin on it and feel secure," recounted Ned Huff, whose family sold homemade lemonade at Grateful Dead concerts. They were among the forerunners of today's nomadic "Snowbirds," who live in huge self-sufficient Recreational Vehicles, over-wintering in the Arizona desert. Some collect rocks and minerals and trade them at an annual market at Quartzsite, where the Morisons found the piece of pyrite that provided the structural starting point for their Venetian work. It rotates ominously above the barren desert landscape in Dark Star, seemingly threatening the Recreational Vehicles clustered below. Menace first emerged as a theme in their work in Earthwalker (2006), when they drew architectonic structures of US wildlife to create a sense of alien threat. The benignly mesmerising soundtrack music complements the eerie beauty of Dark Star, countering its inherent but unrealised visual threat.

Their timber and glass construction Pleasure Island, in the garden courtyard behind the brewery, also derives from the pyrite sample. Here it resembles a cankerous growth, distorting the classical symmetry of the building's brick facade as it twists out from under a shaded loggia, straining to reach the sunlight and grow tall and straight like the adjacent palm trees. The structure is decorative as well as dramatic, prettily inset with panes of brightly coloured glass in homage to the stained glass used in decorating the 1970's house-trucks. It was built with timber sawn from Douglas firs, Grand fir and Western hemlock trees, blown down in an area of ancient woodland in Arthog, North Wales, and acquired by the Morisons in 2005.

In preparation for Venice, they built an identical structure there, Fantasy Island (2007), which can also be visited throughout the duration of the biennale. They plan to develop their woodland into an arboretum by gathering species from around the world. "The task of collecting the various specimens will direct our movements," they say, "acting as a random generator for the places and experiences that feature within the rest of our art practice." As they clear old plantation trees to make way for new species they will use the sawn timber to make new artworks, which adds an ecological dimension to their thoughtful and continually evolving response to the landscape, as they expend from their allotment garden into their arboretum.

The title of the Welsh exhibition in Venice was inspired by the recurring phrase "so it goes" in Slaughterhouse-Five, the 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut, which combined elements of science fiction with an analysis of the human condition. Although Vonnegut used the phrase to mark the transition from life to death, it also resonates with the transition that is central to the Morisons' work, in noticing details in the natural world and re-presenting the familiar in a new light. Like the Huffs financing their lifestyle with lemonade, Heather and Ivan Morison have found the means of creating art as part of their way of life. And what was the nature of the life-changing loss documented on the Welsh carrier bag? The answer is found in a postcard they sent from Cleethorpes last year: "African Grey parrot, grey with red tail feathers. I lost her near Fantasy Island. Life has not been the same."