LOCKY MORRIS

© the artist, writers & publishers

click to open image in new page / scroll right and left

Be Seeing You, Mannheimer Kunstverein, 2020 Catalogue (text Martin Stather)

Alt (Abridged 0_56) 2019 Front covers (5) and interior art, Locky Morris (multiple texts and poetry)

Selected Articles/publications

https://issuu.com/visualartistsireland/docs/van_jf_2023/s/17838540

https://www.liverpoolirishfestival.com/a-correspondence/

https://issuu.com/visualartistsireland/docs/van_so_2019__print_

https://circaartmagazine.net/dennis-mcnulty-locky-morris/

https://visualartistsireland.com/stop-lookin-photographs

http://issuu.com/joecoll/docs/lockymorris-

aweekingoals

“All Humans Do”, essay accompanying a group exhibition curated

http://www.motherstankstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/mothers-annual-2010_Locky-Morris_From-Day-One_©mothers-tankstation.pdf

Locky Morris - Circa Art Magazine

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Archive | Locky Morris

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Archive | Locky Morris

This Then, Locky Morris 2010. Golden Thread Gallery/ RCC Donegal Catalogue (texts Chris Clarke, John M. Cunningham)

From Day One, Locky Morris 2010, Mothers Tankstation, Dublin. Mother's Annual (text Luke Clancy)

Robert Clark, The Guardian
August 28th 2010

'Derry artist Locky Morris deals in what he calls the "daily epiphanies" of chewed pencils, cups of tea, lager bottles and antacid tablets. This exhibition celebrates three decades of such thematically unlikely and highly personal artistic projects. A photograph records the aesthetic cross-associations between the family dog lying on its back on the lawn and an upturned white plastic garden chair. A glass vitrine, lit by a single fluorescent light, contains a fragment of bedroom carpet where the cardboard collar support from the artist's daughter's school uniform lies. This is an art of absurdist banalities that, through careful staging and cumulative thematic hypnotism becomes visual poetry. You can imagine Samuel Beckett chuckling wryly away in the background: "I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo." It's art that's as touching as it is deceptively simple-minded.'

Penelope Curtis,  Tate Gallery

Strongholds 1991 

Locky Morris works in Derry. The situation he has grown up with and encounters in his daily life is an inextricable part of his art. He makes work that will be seen by protagonists or participants in its subject matter,  whose comments may help to evolve its form, whose reactions test its success. Very often that success is measured by the light of recognition,  when a seemingly artificial ‘art object’ evokes the nod of acquiescence. His works are neat formal riddles which must be deconstructed and reconstructed by their audience. They combine economy with depth of feeling. Economy imparts a lighthanded-ness,  so that,  though deadly serious,  the works are never bombastic. The humour which they might evince is defined more properly in terms of relief. Economy of composition - in both physical and mental terms - strengthens the works’s symbolic strength,  so that they live on in the mind. Continual surveillance,  whether by television monitor or army jeep,  are monumentalized.  Daily experience,  carried out under the weight of military occupation,  is made concrete. These works might better be defined as symptoms than symbols. They suggest an inevitable taking shape of a compound emotion. ‘Twist’,  being in the way of a homage,  may make fewer illusions than other pieces. However it is layered in terms of the amount of meaning one wants to draw from it. It is a dizzyingly symbolic work,  which suggests that it will both take you as far as you want to go in taking it apart,  and yet will bring you adroitly back full-circle,  so that you never get to the bottom. Morris may work with an omni-present object - for instance the jeep - and move towards the crystallization of an idea. He may work in the opposite manner,  working almost mechanically towards the realization of a pre-conceived idea by fabricating the necessary components. Morris uses objects which carry heavy local connotations of everyday life,  objects which might be called ritual. By adding another layer or two of meaning,  or by bringing them into association with other objects,  he gives them new life,  and takes them beyond the everyday. 

Various writing /reviews/press cutting 80s/90s/00s

ARTFORUM DECEMBER 2010
Miguel Amado

Locky Morris

The Troubles not only shaped the political landscape in Northern Ireland in the last third of the twentieth century but also influenced local artistic practice there, leaving a mark on local life and imposing on art an ethical imperative to respond. This retrospective of Locky Morris's work, "This Then" (whose second chapter will take place at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, County Donegal, Ireland, next summer), showed the Derry-based artist to have been a prolific commentator on the period, exploring the spirit of the time in diverse works. It also revealed that in the past decade Morris has created art of a more introspective nature, focusing on ordinary matters with an intimist perspective, in keeping with the lived experience of a postconflict society.

An Bhearna Bhaoil - Gap of Danger, 1988, set the tone for the first part of the exhibition, which focused on emblematic works from the 1980s that sympathetically address the popular resistance led by the Nationalists. The work features seven burned garbage can lids with a stripe of tar across them. The title is a phrase from the Irish national anthem, where it evokes the Battle of New Ross, which occurred during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and as such symbolizes Republican opposition to British rule. The work translates this historical feeling in light of recurrent events such as riots - in which the burning of items of everyday use is a common occurrence - and the function that the garbage can lids had for the Catholic inhabitants of Derry, who banged them on the ground to warn of the arrival of police and wielded them like shields. Dawn Raid, 1988, consists of models of armed Land Rover Tangi vehicles - infamously used by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the Northern Irish police) - that surround the model of a house. Forming a circle and painted in yellow and red, colors that recall flames, these elements evoke both a target and an explosion. Town, Country and People, 1985-86, is made of three cones standing on the floor, on which the three entities of the title are shown as blue and black silhouettes, so somber that they suggest an apocalyptic setting. A small toy helicopter rests atop each of these structures; the cones thus represent the beams of light emitted by such craft in their surveillance actions.

After a phase in the mid-'90s devoted more to music than to art, Morris carried out various works in the public arena. Less known, his studio production expanded throughout the 2000s, and was revealed in this exhibition as a coherent investigation of chance in everyday life. He continues to use poor materials, appropriating commonplace objects and manipulating conventional iconographies. For example, for Itch, 1 999, he covered the scrapings from a scratch-off lottery card with a loupe; for From Day One, 2008, he placed on a carpet a wrinkled shirt-collar insert that his daughter had discarded on her first day of school and that he had kept for four years; for Bathroom Suite, 2010, he recorded the sounds of his morning hygiene, which became a sound track emitted from boxes made from shelves combined with bathroom air vents to look like speakers. By mixing multiple personal references, these works constitute a kind of epiphany of one man's current state of affairs.

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.

COPYRIGHT: Copyright Artforum Inc. Dec 2010. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.

Comm, Locky Morris. Catalogue 1994 (text Angela Kingston)