Artist's Statement

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JJ Morgan's work is rooted in her sub-conscious mind.  It emerges through a process she compares to 'dowsing'.  Instead of a dowsing stick to locate something hidden like water, minerals or treasure, she turns to dreams and doodling, which open up underground streams for her creative self to swim in.

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The imagery that emerges has a curious resonance with the human condition; its weirdness, occasional ups and crashing downs, the frailty of the body and its abject state.  There's a dark humour that lurks but, behind it, a sense of mortality and transience.

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Often symbolic, the work resists easy decoding, combining fathomable and unfathomable signs.  Shapes that suggest something familiar but are not.  There's an artlessness in her brushwork and application of materials that stems from a rejection of artifice; a letting go of narrative and anything that makes us feel secure.  Our only meagre comfort is that we are all in this together, trying to figure life out.

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Handmade frames from reclaimed wood and 'low art' materials like enamel or dibond supports reinforce this and act as reminders of the molecular structure we share, underlining both our significance and insignificance at the same time.

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Inspiration: Husserl; phenomenology; Merleau-Ponty; Japanese Ma; Junichiro Tanizaki 'In Praise of Shadows'; Arte Povera; Dubuffet; Phyllida Barlow; Thomas Nozkowski; Forrest Bess; Amy Sillman; Suzan Frecon; Charline von Heyl.

 

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