William Morris at the Museum of Glass
Review by Alec Clayton published in Art Access, July 2005
William Morris is a glass artist, but to apply that appellation to him is to imply a similarity between his work and the whole body of decorative glass objects that have become as ubiquitous as rain in the Pacific Northwest. Like Dale Chihuly and Benjamin Moore and other stars of the studio glass movement, Morris comes out of the Pilchuck studio, but other than a meticulous craftsmanship they all share, his work has little in common with any of the better known Pilchuck artists.
Morris has developed an oeuvre that is idiosyncratic yet universal, evoking ancient magic and mystery. His icons, talismans and imagery consist of anthropomorphic birds (primarily ravens), bones, tusks, funerary urns, skulls both human and animal, and artifacts that look both ancient and contemporary. The surfaces of his objects are usually opaque and heavy looking, with, in some instances, a translucence that is barely visible, signifying that yes, this is glass after all; even though most of his pieces look more like bone, leather, clay or metal than glass.
“William Morris: Object and the Animal, A Mid-Career Survey” at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma is the first major survey of his twenty-year career.
The earliest work in the show is a simple arrangement of three rocks made of highly polished glass with delicate linear veins. Although this piece has the transparency and luminosity usually associated with decorative glass pieces, we see here an early indication of directions Morris takes in later works.
There are representative works from the animals and artifacts of the 1990s that first brought him to wide public attention. These include birds and bird skulls, and two heads of tribal people from indigenous cultures: one a ferocious looking male with dangling skulls for a necklace, and the other a female with an elongated neck adorned with tiny bird skulls. The faces are dull ebony, and the facial structures are hard and bony. Not representing particular people, the woman was inspired by Kenyan women and the man by the ancient Indus people of South Asia. These faces are fierce, proud, handsome and dignified.
“Raven with Skull,” 1998, is an excellent example of the countless ravens and crows Morris has done. The form of the bird’s head and body is streamlined with the elegance of a Brancusi sculpture, but the abstraction and simplification does not sacrifice realism. Like the Kenyan woman and Indus man, this bird is fierce and handsome. The surface has the look of black stone. The raven is perched on top of a stark white human skull. In its beak it holds a tiny round pot, black with red dots. An identical pot rests in one of the skull’s eye sockets. This is a haunting image, mysterious yet real. It is easy to imagine a raven socking away two such pots in the eye sockets of a skull.
There are also three recent large installations, including “Cache,” “Artifact Panel,” and his most recent installation, “Mazorca.”
“Cache” is made up of tusks, approximately the size and shape of elephant or mammoth tusks. They are laid flat on a meal shelf that runs across the entire back wall of the gallery. Scattered in seemingly random patterns on one end of the bed of tusks are bones and skulls. Despite the apparent randomness — as if this is a burial ground accidentally stumbled upon — there are visual patterns that can be discerned when walking around and viewing it from all sides.
“Artifact Panel” is a wall of 369 bowls, urns, horns, skulls, animals and various relics each “pinned” to the wall like specimens in a scientific display. The pins extrude 16 inches from the wall and cast shadows in diamond patterns. Each of the relics, bones, etc. is about the size of a person’s hand, and each is a beautiful little jewel in its own right. The entire panel is 32 feet long and almost nine feet high.
“Mazorca,” a metaphor for harvest and regeneration, was inspired by South American cultures. The main element is corn — ears of corn measuring four to five feet in length and hanging by heavy ropes from a steel frame. Also hanging from the frame are bones and urns and other forms relating to nature, and standing on the base are large urns, many of which reflect the shape of the ears of corn, with surface patterns that replicate the clustered kernels. In spite of the theme of harvest and regeneration, there is a heavy feeling to this piece, a feeling that it also relates to death.
And death, finally, is an overriding theme to many of the pieces in Morris’s oeuvre, most notably in a recent series of cinerary urns he did in 2002 after the death of a family member and in recognition of the loss of lives on September 11, 2001.
© 2002 by Alec Clayton