Interview with Studio Morison

12/06/20

Interview: Studio Morison 

Heather Peak Morison (b1973, UK) and Ivan Winston Morison (b1974, Turkey) have been working together for the past 15 years. Their collaborative practice incorporates aspects of art, sculpture, architecture and performance. They are co-directors of Studio Morison, an artist-led creative practice, and their blueprint for happiness. 

Studio Morison was selected last year as one of the artist practices to be commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire as part of the three-year, region-wide arts commissioning programme New Geographies, funded by the national lottery through Arts Council England, which aims to bring contemporary art to unexpected places in the east of England. Their resulting work, MOTHER …, situated on Wicken Fen, is an interpretation of a traditional fenland hayrick, and offers a space for visitors to sit and shelter and be with nature. The work also engages with the connections between the natural world and our mental health. A series of four events, furthering this connection, has, in part, been postponed due to Covid-19.

I spoke to Heather and Ivan from Studio Morison, while under lockdown, about the ideas behind MOTHER … and the artists’ wider practice.  

Read the full interview here

Interview with Joey Holder at Wysing Arts Centre

13/10/16

Interview: Joey Holder

Joey Holder: Ophiux
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge
25 September – 20 November 2016

Working with cutting edge science, artist Joey Holder (b1981) has created an immersive clinical environment, into which the visitor enters, wearing blue shoe covers, to be confronted with a larger-than-life MRI scanner, tanks containing dried out deep sea creatures, and X-ray light boxes, on which magnified bacteria and a curious skull are displayed. This is Ophiux, a speculative pharmaceutical company of the not-too-distant future, working with synthetic biology, to create new, genetically modified life.

During her 2015 residency at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge Holder was introduced to Dr Marco Galardini, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, and Dr Katrin Linse, senior biodiversity biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge. She has collaborated with them on her research to produce both the installation and the accompanying film, recently premiered at Deptford X, and soon to go on a national tour.  

Having studied sciences and art at A-level, Holder chose to follow an artistic career, studying first at Kingston University and later at Goldsmiths, where she obtained her MFA in 2010. Science has remained an enduring interest, however, as have curious and alien life forms, and – no doubt influenced by her time spent as a dive master in Turkey – the underwater world. This complex and thought-provoking exhibition brings together these diverse strands and makes a case for future such discourses between artists and scientists.

Holder showed Studio International around the installation and explained some of the science fact and science fiction involved.

Watch this interview here

Portfolio: Jesc Bunyard

26/05/15

Portfolio: Jesc Bunyard

“I have become accustomed to the darkness,” smiles Jesc Bunyard. “I spent most of the third year of my BA in the darkroom.” While the artist might be toiling away in the dark, Bunyard’s audience get to luxuriate in the sumptuously rich colours of the photograms that she produces – like cells of dye, they seem to breathe and expand as you gaze upon them.

Photography has always run through Bunyard’s practice, although filmic work grew within the second year of her BA at Goldsmiths (completed in 2013), where she also established a music group, comprising fellow artists and musicians. “Initially this developed out of a desire to push the photograph beyond its two-dimensional boundaries. I want the medium to be seen as something more than just a picture you can hang on a wall. So, I started by displaying my photograms alongside a soundtrack I created.” For Photo Piece, a collaboration with The Angel Orchestra, Bunyard’s photograms were used by the musicians as a visual score for an improvised piece, performed at a classical concert, with no warning to the audience. This intervention was described as “anarchic” by one of the musicians involved. A baritone horn player herself, Bunyard laughs: “I like to think of myself as setting up the parameters for a work and then unleashing it in order for it to be experienced and participated in.”

Jesc Bunyard will be showing two film works at Digital Graffiti, Alys Beach, Florida, 4-6 June 2015. She is a finalist in their juried art competition

She will also be showing some of her film works at the Wysing Arts Centre annual art and music festival, Space-Time: The Multiverse, on 5 September 2015

www.jessicabunyard.com

digitalgraffiti.com

www.wysingartscentre.org/whats_on/annual_music_festival

To see the full portfolio and enjoy the images, please see the June 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine