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

Review of Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital Hauser & Wirth, London

18/07/17

Ida Applebroog: Mercy Hospital

Hauser & Wirth, London
19 May – 29 July 2017

In 1969, Ida Horowitz (b1929), a struggling artist and mother of four, recently moved from Chicago to San Diego, was driving her two young sons to the zoo when suddenly she felt herself unravelling. She was unable to tell red from green, and her children had to guide her through set upon set of traffic lights. Later that day, recognising the danger, she checked herself into the mental health ward of Mercy Hospital.

Ida – who went on to become the internationally successful feminist artist Ida Applebroog (a made-up surname adopted when she felt the need to distance herself from both her maiden name, Appelbaum, and her married name, Horowitz) – had with her a sketchbook. During her six-week stay on the ward, she filled this with drawings and scribbled thoughts, and it is these excavations of her mind that now – after 40 years buried in a basement locker, until they were rediscovered by an studio assistant in 2009 – fill the walls of Hauser & Wirth London’s south gallery in a revealing and insightful show.

Read the review here

Portfolio: Liz Atkin

22/01/16

Portfolio: Liz Atkin

“I was pushing up from the bottom of the bath and the oily, inky water was swirling around me like liquor. It was such a perfect way for me to try to get that sickly, horrible feeling, that was in my body at the time, out into something visual.” In 2014, Liz Atkin suffered a 10-month bout of severe depression. An artist, who was already using her work to help combat her life-long battle with Compulsive Skin Picking (CSP), she was able, once more, to turn to creativity as a means of survival. “It enabled me to pull myself back to health,” she reflects. The resulting works, including Curdled (2014), were shown at ORTUS, for Bethlem Gallery, as part of the Anxiety Festival that year.

For Atkin, her chest and collarbone are particularly significant sites, since this is where she used to pick the most – up to eight hours a day sitting in front of a mirror, picking until she bled. Works like Blue (2014) revisit this violent battleground, touching it gently with chalk dusk on her fingertips. The fact that the colours conjure up a bruise is, of course, no coincidence.

Atkin has recently returned from a week-long trip to UCLA, where she was invited to exhibit her artwork and speak to medical students and staff about her lived experience of CSP, her artwork and her recovery.

“I don’t really talk in terms of being cured because it’s something I live with every day,” she says. “It’s something I’ve done for more than 25 years and my body knows skin picking better than anything. I have to work really hard for it not to happen and art helps. I’m always taking photos on my phone or drawing on the tube. It keeps me centred, focused and calm. It’s mindfulness in action.

“6-8% of the population are said to suffer from some form of body-focused repetitive behaviour, be that skin picking, hair pulling or a physical tick, but CSP is very misunderstood. I have a duty to tell the truth because every time I do so I am destigmatising it. It is not just a personal story, it becomes something that is human and universal.”

Liz Atkin is showing some work as part of LETTING IN THE LIGHT, a temporary lightbox installation organised by Daily Life Ltd in collaboration with Outside In and Bethlem Gallery at Gerry Raffles Square, E15, until the end of March.

lizatkin.com

Image:

Liz Atkin

Curdled

2014

© the artist

See the full portfolio in the February 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine