INTERVIEW ON ASCENSION

Annie Morris piles up signs in a sort of automatic writing, until the work becomes abstract and keeps the color alive in its rawest form, packing the pigment from which “Stacks of Joy” emerge (literally metaphors of pure joy): sculptures shaped with plaster and sand, densely colored, or cast in bronze. A banquet for the eyes, on view at ProjectB gallery in Milan, for the first solo show by the English artist in Italy.

CLB From the years in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, one can see the importance of the gesture and the line of the drawing: the foundation elements of all your work…   

AM I keep going back to drawing, I’m obsessed by the line and by artists who draw, like Jean Cocteau, Paul Klee, Louise Bourgeois and Picasso; the lines of art that inspire me, the starting point of all my work.   

CLB Notably the “Face Paintings” born from an impressive number of details that characterize your delicate pictorial gesture. Canvases dense with signs and shadings, where the contours of faces, bundled together and replicated to infinity, emerge from pale backgrounds…   

Jean Neal: The emotional impact of her pictorial gesture accompanies us in the passage from figurative to abstract…

CLB From the paintings hung on the walls to the sculptures that stand at the heart of the show…   

AM The “Stacks” began in a dark period, but they represent joy and hope…   

JN They defy the law of gravity, rising to the sky!   

AM They have been defined as “the impossibility of stacking” and effectively they came from an impossibility: they contain an infantile but at the same time sophisticated note.   

CLB As a student of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone you have gone forward with the passion for sculpture, mystery and color…   

AM I wanted to keep the color compact and raw, but delicate at the same time; almost a way of painting in which the colored balls are my brushstroke.   

JN They function as signifiers from whole a tradition of making,  that are uniquely specific to women’s art.   

AM The fragility and the “handmade” aspect are important, as in the “Thread Drawings” that are expressive in the contrast between the freedom of drawing and the precision of embroidery.   

JN Two aspects coexist in Annie’s works: what you see – the line and the sense of form – and what you feel.   

CLB Annie, how do you perceive your work in this space?   

AM What I like is that it communicates a condensed history of my work: a feeling of controlled freedom.