Preview of solo exhibition Spin-Drift by contemporary Tasmanian painter Anne Morrison
23 August – 16 September 2023
Despard Gallery is proud to present ‘Spin-Drift’, solo exhibition by contemporary Tasmanian painter Anne Morrison. In her fifth solo exhibition with Despard Gallery, Morrison presents a new suite of paintings that reflects her ongoing investigation into how we connect and interact with our environment.
Based in Forth on the North-West Coast of Tasmania, Morrison draws inspiration from the world around her and the richness and diversity of Tasmania’s natural environments. Her work reflects an endless fascination with ecologies, dynamic living systems, and nature’s wonder. Fragments of undergrowth, delicate textures of lichens and mosses, seeds and spores carried by wind and water currents are evoked through paint to reflect the rich tapestry that is life and our entanglement and connection with the natural world. From the studio, Morrison conveys these memories, experiences and encounters through paint, visually re-imagining the landscape as an evolving ecosystem, living, breathing, and teaming with life, compositions echoing the patterns and rhythms in nature within the terrain of each composition.
Anne Morrison graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1988, received a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art London 1990 and a PhD from Hobart School of Art, University of Tasmania in 1999. She has held over twenty solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore. Morrison has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Elizabeth Greenshields Award, Canada (1988), The John Minton Travel Award, Royal College of Art London (1989), as well as the Association of Commonwealth Universities Scholarship in 1994 and Australian Government Regional Arts Grant in 2020. Morrison has also been a finalist in numerous prizes including the Glover prize in 2006 and 2015, the Hadley’s Art prize in 2022, as well as being highly commended in the Tidal Art prize for 2020 and 2022. Notably, Morrison won the inaugural Women’s Art Prize in 2019. Her work is held in many public and private collections, including Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Trawalla Foundation, Artbank, Parliament House Art Collection, Devonport Regional Gallery, Royal College of Art London and The Scottish Arts Council.