Julia Morison
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1952
No Names for Things No String for 03
- 2003
- Mixed media on board
- Purchased 2003
- 1220 x 448 x 22mm
- 2003/112.a-i
Tags: monochrome, stripes, trees
Julia Morison's multi-panel work – which can be rehung in any order – began life as part of a much larger ‘endless painting’, which was then broken up into smaller sequences.It borrows its title from a prose poem Anna Smith wrote in response, capturing its open-ended, free-associating spirit.
By combining incompatible varnishes, Julia creates fine splits in the painted surface. She then rubs pigment into these cracks, generating hundreds of suggestive, zigzagging lines that extend wherever she chooses. No Names for Things No String for 03 unravels an imaginative visual world in which the only rule is constant change.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Exhibition History
These panels are part of an ongoing series of work in which Julia Morison makes playful associations in a surrealist way. The black organic forms on the two large panels are like trees or underwater seaweed and a Japanese influence can be seen in the flat narrative design that unfolds in a sequence.
Throughout her career Morison has had an interest in design and surface texture and here she has used a variety of craft techniques and effects, including drips of paint, crackle glaze and drawing.
Born in Pahiatua, Morison studied Graphic Design at the Wellington Polytechnic and the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, where she has been senior lecturer in painting since 1999. She has exhibited nationally since 1975 and has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, including the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1989 and the New Zealand Moet et Chandon Fellowship in 1990, which enabled her to travel to France for a year’s residency.