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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 35. No. 12. 7 June 1972

Gwen Morris — Exhibition: University Library

page 11

Gwen Morris

Exhibition: University Library

Heading with a Gwen Morris artwork

When I went to talk to Gwen Morris about her etchings she showed me a Janet Frame poem about a tree. I sus-ected a trick, a very red herring, because she didn't want to talk. But no trick. The poem :

'Theres a tree thats going to be cut down any day
and does not know it, for trees never know until
the axe ripe time descends to sever their roots
from the cool underground pantry, earth lined,
sun-and rain-supplied.'

is a faithful clue to the way Gwen Morris uses her special visual sensitivity to sometimes mourn, often rejoice in the magic she sees constantly in living things.

Etching is one of the intaglio printing processes in which the image to be printed is sunk into the printing surfaces and filled with a greasy printers ink. The surface is then wiped clean so that the ink remains only in the incised design. The great pressure required to pick up the ink in the intaglio printing leaves a visible plate mark within the margin of the uncompressed paper.

This can be seen as the white shape in the bottom part of Toru and the printing of the uninked plate in Burkes Pass

Burke's Pass artwork

Burke's Pass artwork

In etching, instead of cutting directly onto the plate as is done in dry point and engraving, the artist covers the plate with acid resistant ground and then draws on the plate with a sharp tool to remove the ground where the design is to be. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath which bites into the plate where the protective covering has been removed. By leaving different areas exposed to the acid for varying times the quality of the line bitten can be controlled. The finished plate is then printed as an engraved plate would be.

Well by now you may have guessed that etching is a tender/harsh process. There is the acid biting into the plate, but there is also the tenderness of the softest part of the palm which is used for the final wiping of the plate before a print is taken. It is of great importance to Gwen Morris that she makes etchings not paintings. She feels that etching is like poetry - tentative, suggestion making, full of allusion - whereas painting is more like prose.

Gwen Morris's etchings are exquisitely controlled, and because in this kind of printing the elements are restricted (tonal range is more important than hue, vastness of scale is impossible, etc) economy is all-important. Etching like drawing is an art of omission, the art is in knowing what to omit. In Gwen Morris's art the idea and the expressing/processing of that idea are absolutely in harmony., 'The artists vision is a music of shape, born in the expression of an idea in which no one thing counts in its own right but only in its place and relation to the whole. This balance which is the underlying and essential brotherliness of things is beauty (Marion Richardson).

To return then to the tree; beauty in art, in living things is a knowledge that Gwen Morris is desperate for every body to have and keep. The print Kawerau is pretty goddam angry. After the Kawerau gorge in Central Otago had been raped first by the goldminers, then by overgrazing, people began to plant orchards, at last using the land well. Now, however, the Clutha river development scheme threatens to flood the whole valley out of existence. Gwen Morris's expression of this in Kawerau is growing lines attacked, torn at the sides and split in the centre.

Some will be for burning is about destruction too. Its title comes from another Janet Frame poem.

In the deep sky the trees may learn, and man.
to take their hot gold coin, and some,
not all, will be for burning.

However, the 'not all' ('green embers kindled by creek water and soft rain') are really important for Gwen Morris. She is no pessimist.

Burkes Pass celebrates in joyful runaway writing the foresight of someone long long ago who argued 'plant trees for your lives', to stop the land slipping away into the rivers and out to the sea. In Gwen Morris's closest life are children and grandchildren — the positiveness of growing things, moon, tide, another grandchild on the way.

Child vision - fresh ways of seeing - are really important to Gwen Morris as an artist. She finds immense delight and amazement in the quality, the goodness of the childs mind. The writing of Janet Frame is also important to her because it opens a way for looking back into childhood, a way for renewing the magic of seeing things for the first time:

We remember clearly the world before birth
When waterfalls touched our skin and we grew,
thinking first we might be a tree or a tadpole until
the oppression of knowing surged in us refusing
to set us free from what we had begun to be.

Toru

Toru

This Kina or discovery comes for us, the viewer through the window in many of the etchings. Gwen Morris explains the windows of the thick walled Central Otago cottages as a new way of seeing the landscape - a frame/focus, because through the row windows the eye cannot run away to the distance, but looks closely at the land lying nearby. The little window in the cottage in Makara is not like this. Gwen Morris was fascinated by the row of little cottages at Makara and how the hills behind flew back!

This is the experience past and present that Gwen Morris expresses so well. It has little to do with nostalgia or sentiment. It is always vital, living, but far from literal fact. This is the magic, '..these further, softer, less precise and less material ideas are like tenderer newer branches which pierce new holes in the air.

Gwen Morris artwork