Work Derek Morris
Derek Morris
Derek Morris will be presenting a selection of sculptures, drawings and prints in his solo show- '25 Years thinking.'
Saturday 11th September- Saturday 2nd October 2010.
Derek Morris:
"I consider myself to be operating within the European Modernist tradition of Constructed Art. The formal language of my current work is based upon simple geometry which emanates from the built environment, most particularly from the architectural device known as the squint which is a sloping sided aperture piercing thick walls between chapel and chancel in medieval churches and used for viewing. A modified form of this structure, which has the characteristic of concentrating one's gaze and drawing it inwards to a more distant point, appears in all my recent works which take the form of wall hung reliefs and sculptures. I have made these reliefs in ceramic, stainless steel, aluminium, cast epoxy resin and more recently plywood. These different materials lend their own special qualities to the works. In addition to the basic form of the squint and carefully chosen materials, repetition and shifts in perspective increase the complexity of the space which develops between the moving viewer and the static vertical plane against which the reliefs are displayed. Earlier works in this series had coloured internal backgrounds which shone through slots formed by a reflective stainless steel matrix. Others had sheets of coloured light. The purpose of both light and colour was to destabilise the spaces between and to encourage the development of particular moods in the viewer. More recent works, some of them maquettes for larger sculptures, increasingly use other means to disrupt the viewers gaze. In other words, the background plane is now disintegrating visually."
These works are increasingly without subject. They are concerned with colour in its own right, simple geometric forms, ways of seeing and the reactivity of materials one with another. In the words of Frank Stella, the American painter “What you see is what you see.”
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