Mali Morris,Returning,Hatton Gallery,Newcastle University by Sue Hubbard
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
Mark Rothko.
Mali Morris is a painter’s painter, yet one who appeals equally to a lay audience as much as to the cognoscenti and practitioner. There’s a generosity and openness to her paintings with their vibrant seductive colour and translucent luminescence that draws in the untutored viewer and student of contemporary abstract art, alike. You don’t have to know about painting to appreciate their vitality (though doing so will give an added depth to their appeal). They sing to the senses, to a love of colour and life.
Born in Caernarfon in 1945 in her grandmother’s house, her father was Welsh speaking, initiating in her early the joy of Welsh poetic structures, the intricacies of the englyn that, on some deep level, still perhaps reverberate in the flow and rhythms of her paintings. Her retrospective Returning, at the Hatton Gallery at the University of Newcastle, where she studied in the Department of Fine Art from 1963 -1968, features around 40 key works spanning 45 years. These trace her development from the early gestural, stained pieces with their lyrical diaphanous colours influenced by Helen Frankenthaler, to her more recent works constructed through considered geometric layering. The stained paintings on thin cotton duck are open, expansive and fragile, loosely inspired by sights enjoyed in the natural world. The pastoral scenes she experienced growing up in the valleys and hills around that dark mysterious Welsh village, Blaenau Ffestiniog. Though she admits, that early in her career, she hadn’t heard of colour field painting, her stains of soft colour intuitively find their own forms.
Mali Morris Returning at the Hatton Gallery, 2024. Photo credit Colin Davison
It was during the 1970s and 1980s, that I first encountered her work. She had recently established herself in a studio, an old electricity depot in a leafy corner of Greenwich near the park, shared with other artists, most of whom were abstract painters occupied in debates around American Abstract Expressionism. It was during this period that she was ‘engaged in the long apprenticeship of modernism,’ but she never followed it slavishly.
A major shift occurred in 1997. Though technical, the effect was emotional and psychological. Removing small areas in the top wet layers of paint, (‘clearing’) rather than adding marks of colour onto the surface of the canvas, created a deep dive into the body of a work, raising questions as to what constitutes the ground of a painting, and how these areas sit in space, drawing the eye through to a different realm. These ‘clearings’ allowed her to find her own unique language that did not rely on the vocabulary of others.
Mali Morris, Through, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 21 x 26 cm
Mali Morris, Voyage, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 55cm
A form of archaeology, an uncovering, they bore into deeper dimensions. Freud, famously used archaeological excavation as a metaphor for remembering. Things change over time and the process of brushing away, wiping off, and uncovering disturbs original readings so that the past permeates the present. Space and time are altered. Coalesce. What was forgotten is remembered. Wormholes created in the top layer of paint allow light to filter through so that, as the poet T.S. Eliot suggests ‘Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past’. It is light that links these different elements in this palimpsest of stratified memory. A common metaphor for the divine in classical religious art light, here, in these secular, modernist paintings, suggests not so much the holy but a creative renewal; the investigation into a state beyond the superficial daily appearance of things. It creates luminosity and radiance – a thing in and of itself – so the relationship between the parts of the painting create possibilities, an inner life and depth that’s no longer restricted simply to the surface. Colour and light are both the magic and the meaning.
Mali Morris has always had an intense sympathy with and for poetry. Her paintings have the visual intensity and spareness of haikus where metaphor is embodied within the imagery of the actual. She quotes the American poet Jorrie Graham. ‘I’d say poetry wants to be contagious, to be a contagion.’ ‘Its syntax wants to pass something on to another in the way that you can, for example, pass on laughter.’ The same could be said for her viewers’ relationship to her paintings. They are contagious. They pass on something of the intense pleasure of seeing and being alive.
Mali Morris, Impeller II, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 220 cm
Recently her focus has changed again. In Ghost 2017 and Impeller II 2023 (surely influenced by Matisse’s 1953 Snail) seem to be made of squares of coloured paper (though it is in fact acrylic paint) arranged randomly, almost like collage cutouts, to create complex tonal relationships. In contrast to the ‘clearings’, these build on the surface of the paintings, creating veils of different hues and contrasts. Our perception of space is defined through the varying luminosities, between the light and the dark areas. She has said that her work depends (rather like jazz) on a relationship between improvisation and strategy, that it is constructed through chromatic shifts and light-making relationships. She is fascinated by how the space of a painting and the space of the world are separate form one another, yet always connected. She sees ‘painting as a never-ending process, and investigation into what I find beguiling and mysterious about pictorial structures, which take in the world, are related to it, but have their own language of light, space and boundary.’
Exploring the syntax of abstract art for more than two decades, during a period of intense critical debate around the point, purpose and possibilities of painting, when it has regularly been declared dead as the Dodo and theory has dominated in art schools and seminars, she has found a way to remain true to her own voice and lyrical vision. Notions of the sublime don’t often find their way into contemporary painting, yet Mali Morris, for all her technical mastery, is not afraid to evoke this intensity within her viewers. Whilst not descriptive, her paintings expand our vision of the world, so that we become more aware, more open to the effects and joys of depth, colour and light.