The Morisons use cultural shorthand to survey the array of human endeavours and their impact on the natural world. Starmaker (2005), for example, entangles the realms of natural and cultural history and science fiction so that we can appreciate the oddities of both. A medium format slideshow of images - including dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, rose farming in Ecuador, Dutch tulip fields, container ships and the coastline of the UK - is accompanied by field recordings and electronic sounds sampled from sci-fi movies. The Morison's brief was to create a pictorial survey of Earth as if made by an alien, to consider how the familiar might be understood by an outsider and thereby re-evaluate cultural clichés.
Sally O'Reilly, Heather & Ivan Morison, Frieze, March 2006

'Earthwalker', their recent show at Danielle Arnaud, further extended the binding of the narrative discourses of science fiction to natural history understood as a discursive narrative. Outside, beehives had been converted into architectural towers that resembled minimalist sculptural objects. The titling of these objects, Crystal Worlds, 2006, correlates the internal workings of these once functional devices with JG Ballard's hallucinatory novel, The Crystal World. That this novel haunted Robert Smithson's practice is no coincidence. Smithson is certainly present here. His narrated slideshow, Hotel Palenque, 1969-72, makes an uncanny return in the form of Starmaker, a projected work using medium-format slides and a soundtrack here split over two floors. This work also aligns itself explicitly with science fiction. In part this is through the sounds culled from sci-fi cinema, but is also indicated in its named reference to Olaf Stapledon's novel Star Maker, published in 1937. Stapledon's meditation on creation and complexity perhaps illuminates the images of natural history dioramas, industrial-scale horticulture and the British coastline. Whereas Stapledon's narrator travels out of his body on Earth to become an observer of other worlds, the Morisons present home as if to an alien. Science fiction needs to be recognised as more than a stylistic preference. Literary critic Darko Suvin asserts that science fiction can be usefully thought of as the literature of cognitive estrangement, as opposed to unbridled fantasy or the stock elements of folk tales in which anything is possible. Rather, a different, but believable world with an internal logic, a world that has undergone transformation from our own, makes the possibility of other, especially social and political, transformations possible in the imagination of a reader or viewer. Science fiction retains that critical impulse Theodor Adorno identified in forms of autonomous avant-garde artworks--the possibility that things might be otherwise.
Dan Smith, Unnatural histories: Dan Smith on narrative fictions and the archival impulse in recent art, Art Monthly, March 2007.

Starmaker
2005
Dual medium format slide / audio installation

Installation British Art Show 6,
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2005