“Drawing for me has the ability to stop life suddenly and save it in a moment. I have an extreme and sentimental attachment to things. I make drawings as if to confirm their existence and prolong their lives.” – Annie Morris
Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works from London-based artist Annie Morris. Morris is best known for pieces that combine obsessive drawing and readymade sculptures. She intertwines two and three-dimensional elements to create sculptural tapestries. The new Stitch Drawings featured in this exhibition stem from Morris’ obsession with lines, the simple and singular value of a drawn line, and the possibilities into which a line can extend.
Several of the works in Hope From a Thin Line combine the spontaneity of ‘automatic’ drawing with the slow, tactile, and expressive nature of stitching. Morris finds inspiration in simple materials everyday objects and this influence is readily seen in her work – most notably, her clothespin paintings.
In these new works, Morris uses thread to create elaborate and detailed suspended canvases. The largest piece measures 225 inches in length and contains thousands of tiny threads that branch out from an initial line. The Stitch Drawings are an exploration of death and the afterlife. The thread acts as both a disruption of the original drawing, and a way of mending it, giving it new life. As with stitching torn clothes or an open wound, the stitching of the canvas is a form of healing and renewal, imbuing the work with a sense of possibility. The works also examine the hopeful balance between this world and the next through the symbolic imagery that recurs across the canvases: three headed trees, birds, floating heads, three-fingered figures and numbers.
Also exhibited in the gallery are Morris’ monumental stack sculptures. Towers shaped from plaster, sand, and painted with raw pigment, they resemble a three-dimensional artist’s palate. Originally inspired by the 1988 painting called ‘Bed with Colour’ by Tapies. The dry freshly painted feel of the stack’s egg-shaped form, is Morris’ metaphor to childbirth and fragility. As with the stitched canvases, there is an air of hopefulness and of possibility to them: themes that Morris has returned to as a way of confronting the difficult realities of personal loss.
Annie Morris was born in the UK in 1978. Since completing her degree from Ecole des Beaux-Arts Paris in 2002 where she studied under Giuseppe Penone and the Slade School of Art, London she has received international acclaim for her immediate and considered approach to drawing, sculpture and painting she has exhibited at The Royal Academy, London, Baku MoMA, Azerbaijan and The New Art Gallery, Walsall and Tate Gallery, St Ives.
