Morwenna Morrison

Morwenna Morrison’s work explores the porous boundaries between past and present, myth and memory, psychological depth and painterly surface. Using collage, layering and juxtaposition, each canvas asks what endures, what is lost, and how we recognise ourselves across centuries and contexts.

Morrison’s recent paintings reach back into childhood, creating a thought-provoking melange of personal memory with universal experience; encouraging us to reflect on our individual mythologies. Strong lighting, long shadows and visual storytelling bring a sense of theatre, capturing the wonder and unease of growing up. A surreal element is lent to these compositions through the use of Lilliputian scale and strange juxtapositions conjuring up childhood imaginings. Each composition encouraging us to reflect on potentially lost creativity and the fleeting magic of play.

Morwenna Morrison is a BA (hons) graduate of the Exeter College of Art and Design’s Fine Art programme, who has exhibited extensively across the UK as both a solo artist and a contributor to group shows in the UK and abroad.  Morwenna has been selected on several occasions for the RA summer show, The RWA annual open exhibition, and the Lynn Painter Stainers prize. Morrison lives and works in Cornwall, where she continues to expand her quietly powerful vocabulary of painterly narratives.

The Tower
In fairy tales, there is a popular trope of beautiful damsels being locked away in a tower. Themes are returned to again and again with in a child’s play just as a favourite book might be read countless times or a film rewatched.

Here I have created another world to escape to or escape from, using detritus from the studio.

The image comes from the same era in which Rapunzel was written.  Jakob Philipp Hackert – a lovely pastoral scene with cows and a dog. Somewhere you might like to take your ease although the reality of living in that time, you might very well want to escape from.

The props seen in The Tower were objects found in my studio – just as a child I would forage odds and ends around the house to create similar fantastical worlds.

Flying South
This painting came about through a series of happy consequences. Firstly, I began to play, making a series of planes of various shapes and sizes. I must have made literally a hundred or more, less sophisticated paper planes during my childhood.

I wanted to use the cover of a penguin classic that would have stood out for me as a teenager. We had stacks of these books at home; the cover is such an iconic design.  ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ was notorious and will have appealed to many rebellious youths since it came to print, banned as it was in the United States.

A friend suggested I look at a book depicting paper planes found around New York during the 1970s by the artist Harry Smith.  I wanted to find an iconic back drop to celebrate his eccentric collection, coming across this painting of Central Park created in the 1920’, stylistically very much of its time.

It then came to me that the principal character, Holden Caulfield obsessed over where the ducks went in winter, symbolic of how he survived his own emotional winters ie depression, and his fear of change.  Ironically most the ducks stay in the park as they are fed on a regular basis but some fly south. The shadow cast might represent the influence of the book over the years as its acceptability changes throughout the eras.

  • Flying South

    2024
    Oil on wood panel
    50 × 60cm
    £6500

  • The Tower

    2024
    Oil on wood panel
    50 × 60cm
    £6500