Online Gallery

Synergy

Artist: Anne Morrison
Scientist: Caroline Sutton

Anne Morrison

For many years I have been interested in patterns, rhythms and processes in nature. I was linked with Caroline Sutton, a scientist who studies introduced marine species. As a painter I chose to respond to the Watersipora, to the insight I was given into this species growth and form.

It was not just the visual insight and information I had received that intrigued me, but the language that Caroline used to describe this unfamiliar microscopic landscape, and in particular the structure of the Watersipora. I developed two paintings which evolved through the exploration of repetitive painting processes, creating patterns and rhythms which echo the growth and form of the Watersipora. Echo is the central term in describing this work, as the paintings are not direct representations of this species.

The "idea/understanding" of their growth and patterning was the trigger. The paintings subsequently took on a life of their own echoing related patterns and rhythms in nature, yet with an underlying constructed/ artificial look.

Caroline Sutton

Anne Morrison’s representation of Watersipora subtorquata was at first sight immediately familiar and recognisable to me. The colour, form and radial growth pattern all reflect that of this species. Watersipora subtorquata is an encrusting fouling bryozoan introduced from Mexico and one of many fouling species transferred around the world, most likely on the hulls of boats and ships. Despite its exotic and therefore undesirable status, it is intricate and beautiful. Upon close inspection I observe the individual "cones" sitting upright and three dimensional, where they really lie flat. I recognise that by transforming it in this way, Anne not only understands the structure and morphology of this species but has emphasized that a bryozoan colony consists of many individual zooids growing together in a colonial existence, and that each "cone", like the zooid, is complete in itself yet part of the bigger picture.