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This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of iconic Matakana pottery Morris & James and it is also 50 years since its founder, Anthony Morris, first started creating pots in clay.
To mark these milestones, a special retrospective, or Survey Exhibition, of personal artwork by Ant
Morris is being staged, together with the publication of a book about his art and the launch of a new range of pots, platters and panels made by him in his own home studio.
Anthony Morris – A Gloriously Imperfect Journey opens in the Collection Room at Morris & James on Saturday, November 4, and it will be open daily from 10am to 4pm until Sunday, December 10.
Elizabeth McClure, who works from a studio at Morris & James, has curated the exhibition. She thought the scores of pots and other artworks scattered through Ant’s home, garden and outbuildings deserved a wider audience, and much of what will be on display has never been shown in public before.
“When you’ve been working all this time, you don’t think of it as a part of anything whole, but when you stop at the end and look back, there are so many things,” Ant says. “Elizabeth is an academic and exhibiting glass artist, and she has got a great knowledge of the art world. I’m a potter. She saw all these things and said, ‘why doesn’t anyone know about this, why is this stuff in private?’ So she has definitely been the driving force.”
Some of the works on display have been shut away for years.
“Sometimes, I just got sick of doing something and closed the door,” he says. “There are dozens and dozens of things; the problem has been how to select the few. It would be very easy to flood the place, so it’s been a case of how to be rigorously selective. But it’s been a lovely journey for me.”
The earliest, and possibly smallest piece on display will be a simple, wooden figure carved by Ant in South Africa in 1965; the starting point for a journey of global influence and ongoing search for authentic expression.
Since suffering a stroke in 2006 at the age of 68, and selling Morris & James to staff members in 2009, Ant’s creativity has had to take an alternative path to the one he might have originally chosen, having to re-learn to write and other skills. He began painting clay panels, then painting landscapes and portraits, before getting back to his creative roots.
“I’d been doing acrylics and was starting to get sick of them,” he says. “I suddenly thought I want to make some more pots and that became the Anthony Morris Studio. That’s been quite a journey.”
Browsing through the exhibition, the new pieces and the book, it becomes clear that Ant Morris, who is now in his 80th year, is in no mood to slow down or let go of his relentless creative energy and ideas, and it is this that needs celebrating, according to Elizabeth McClure.
“Ant has been so prolific, so we had to be selective, do it as a survey, or snapshots from various phases,” she says. “It’s not decade-by-decade, it’s a body of work. This is a chance to focus on the Morris of Morris & James – it’s his personal work, and it’s not work that many people will have seen.”
