Julia Morison to the Power of Ten
Exhibition view: Julia Morison, Ode to Hilma, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi (3 February–30 June 2024). Courtesy City Gallery Wellington. Photo: Cheska Brown.
Julia Morison recently presented ten sensual paintings for a breathtaking solo show at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. The show spoke to Morison's intelligent and compelling practice.
The 'Meditations' spanned the full length of one wall in the gallery, echoing the scale and grandeur of Hilma af Klint's The Ten Largest (1907), which had occupied the same space in the gallery in 2021–22. Yet Morison's works impressed not in their monumentality but in their complexity.
Made on plywood and comprising the artist's familiar arsenal of ten symbolic elements—transparency, gold, silver, mercury, blood, reflection, excrement, clay, ash, and lead—each consisted of distinct aspects of the ten symbols and their corresponding materials in different ways. Situation and Calcification combined clay, lead, carbon, and excrement, while Conjugation featured almost all the symbolic materials.
In its sophisticated play of forms and materials, 'Meditations' is a continuation of the visual language that Morison developed in the mid-1980s, the historical underpinning reinforced through a new iteration of her Vademecum (1986), this time 100 works on paper which wrapped around the three remaining walls in the exhibition.
While af Klint evolved a highly personal symbology and colour system, Morison's methodology is based on her interpretation of two belief systems. Firstly, the Kabbalah, a compendium of Jewish mysticism, in particular the Sephirothic Tree, a chart used to understand the universe as divided into ten sephirot, or emanations, that show ascending relations between man, the world, and the cosmos.
Morison combines Kabbalah references with appropriations from Greek Hermetic documents, alchemy, Greek mythology, and the metaphor of refining one's soul as it moves towards salvation. Drawing on a graphic-design background and responding to our contemporary media landscape, she pares back these two ancient sources to a style of modern advertising logos and connects them, as in the Sephirothic system, with channels that show intersections, relationships, and transitions between and through various states.
Morison's interest in Kabbalah and Hermetica began as a student in the 1970s. Finding her early career of geometric abstract painting limiting, in 1986, Morison formally introduced her guiding structure with Vademecum, a 55-part set of drawings in which each symbol represented an element, and each element dictated the materials used to make the work.
As Morison later explained, 'One of the things that drew me to [the Kabbalah] is that it is a tool for understanding the world, a kind of model of the universe—so each person has to make their own use of it [...] I particularly like the way it encourages people to make connections between things that are often opposed—the sacred and the profane, the sensual and the intellectual.'1
Morison was not alone in looking to symbols, signs, and language in the 1980s. At this time, several artists and theorists in Aotearoa New Zealand were engaging with linguistics, post-structural theory, and the complex equation of text, sign, and object, specifically in relation to gender.
Wystan Curnow, in the catalogue for his exhibition Sex & Sign (1987–88), typically explains then-current thinking: 'There is a relation between language, the symbolic order, and the construction of gender. This follows on from a recognition, new in this century, that there is no experience unmediated by language and that our subjectivity, gender included, is inextricably bound in the system of language and the other signifying codes that make up the symbolic order.'2
Morison has continued to question the parameters of gender throughout her career, returning to modern mystical thought to avoid definitive terms and hierarchies. Encountering af Klint's work in person for the first time in 2022, Morison recognised the earlier artist as a kindred seeker.3
Across her rich and varied oeuvre, Morison constantly leans into the uncanny and encourages us to contemplate the mysteries of esoteric thought that defy singular meaning. Her extraordinary 'Meditations' focus our attention on dynamic relationships between ideas and materials, providing a model for how the dedicated experimentation of an artist might guide us to alternative ways of thinking and being.
In Morison's own words, 'The components are diverse and enigmatic enough to provide an alternative to historical dogma, particularly that of the Christian patriarchal tradition.' Read against the backdrop of today's divisive climate, the works offer hope for a way out of our current systems through the possibility of coexisting differences and harmony between incompatible parts. —[O]
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