Still Lifes There is a sense of foreboding in an image by Heather and Ivan Morison. The roses in a vase are beautiful, but what about the dead wood pigeons? It's hard to escape the morbid sense that the flowers will wilt and the birds decay. Conflating an art historical genre with modern technology, a series of large, luscious photographs revisit 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. Cut flowers are almost bursting with pulchritude and the flesh of a wood pigeon, a fish and a pig's head are woozy with gaminess. Here the artists are credited as Mr & Mrs Ivan Morison, adopting the outmoded patriarchal system of nomenclature to match the still-life genre. Their apparent schizophrenia might seem a tongue-in-cheek parody, but the Morisons are emphatic that they are not adopting personas or drawing caricatures of types. It is more a case of teasing out and exaggerating certain propensities in themselves This series was begun whilst we were living in Rotterdam during 2004 and is influenced by the Dutch still life and vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries, referencing the symbolism of the brevity of human life and the transience of earthly pleasures. The process of producing each image stretches over many days as the flowers are encouraged to bloom then wilt. Only then, at the precise moment when the display reaches its maximum potential, but before the petals fall, do we photograph it.
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