B.
The Bright Stuff
Behind the scenes
Before the quakes, we thought of our Outer Spaces programme as something extra – a nice complement to all the art going on inside. At present, however, with the building still occupied, the Outer Spaces are our Only Spaces, and any new addition to them counts for a lot more than it might have a year ago.
Julia Morison Aibohphobia 2011. Acrylic paint. Reproduced courtesy of the artist
Returning to the city this week after some time away, it was a kick to see Julia Morison's new mural on the carpark Bunker. It was also a bit shocking to realise how many months it had been since I stood in front of a new artwork – in fact any artwork – on show here at the Gallery. The buzz of seeing new art appear is not just a perk of the job. It's the reason many of us got hooked on gallery work in the first place. And it's turning out to be a hell of a long time between drinks.
Anyway, the mural is one of the most abstract paintings Julia has made in a long while – a work that connects as much with her terrific sharp-edged early Rhombus works as it does with her recent skeins, loops and flourishes. Nonetheless, Christchurch viewers keen on finding quake connections shouldn't have to hunt too hard. The diagonal passage where the two circuits meet and 'flip' feels distinctly tectonic to me, a fault running through the composition. And the colour choice ought to make any Civil Defence worker or inspecting engineer nod in recognition. As seen on a thousand hard-hats and reflective vests, it's high-visibility green.
Related
Exhibition
Julia Morison: Aibohphobia
June 2011 – May 2013
Julia Morison has turned the Gallery's squat grey bunker into a dizzying vision in dayglo green.
Collection
Julia Morison Tootoo
Julia Morison’s Tootoo was created as part of a brim-full series of multi-panelled paintings called Gargantua’s Petticoat. The series is an array of riotous provocation, full of abstracted sensual forms that allude to corsetry and piercings, petticoats and hula hoops, bed springs and bandages. Julia was painting lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1999–2007. This followed eight years living in France, an originally unanticipated outcome of being awarded the one-year Moët et Chandon Fellowship artist residency in 1990.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Julia Morison Some thing, for example
Julia Morison’s 'Some thing, for example' is like a broken life-support system for the waiting, blob-like entity which, although securely caged, seems more traumatised than dangerous, and without anybody to administer aid.
Like all who experienced the 2010–11 earthquakes in Canterbury, Morison, living near the edge of Christchurch’s cordoned ‘red zone’, was delivered a frequent heightened dose of adrenaline. With this, she encountered new aesthetic possibilities in found, discarded objects; sculptural media of a kind that the physical environment had never previously supplied. From a situation of dislocation and abandonment, she has created work of an unexpected material and formal beauty. (Above ground, 2015)