Julia Morison

Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1952

Tootoo

  • 2006
  • Mixed media on aluminium laminate
  • Gift of the artist, 2008
  • 2800 x 2400mm
  • 2008/043.a-l

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- )

Exhibition History

earlier labels about this work
  • [Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016] (https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/op-pop)

    Like a Gordon Walters painting doing the cancan, Julia Morison’s Tootoo makes ready to kick the high-minded formalism out of abstract painting and take the viewer on a wild, exhilarating dance. Folding and reversing on itself, and playing with positive and negative space, the work's elaborate structure creates a powerful visual conundrum.

    (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)