Heather & Ivan Morison
Lives in North Wales (United Kingdom), lives in Brighton (United Kingdom).
Heather and Ivan Morison make art as an active engagement with materials, histories, sites, and processes. Through peripatetic travels the Morisons have produced sculpture, photographs, buildings, and fiction. For the last four years the artists have based themselves in a remote Welsh village of Arthog to develop a long term project of an arboretum. The Morisons represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
Their work challenges people to look squarely into the future and prepare themselves for what might be coming. It proposes a shift in thinking from the popular environmentalist view that we must preserve the status quo to the survivalist approach of preparing for an unstoppable and inevitable change. The recent work of Heather & Ivan Morison explores the theme of the impending collision between modern life and the natural world combined with the reactions/ solutions offered by people from survivalists to Buckminster Fuller.
Since graduating Heather and Ivan Morison have been immersed in an epic semi-fictional drama. They also documented their travels by photographing interesting trees in China and writing a science fiction story on a cargo ship bound for New Zealand. Some of their projects fail, like their attempt to write a skywriting novel, but, they are still epic failures, as romantic and aspirational as Icarus.