For more than twenty years, William Morris has captivated and intrigued the art community with hauntingly evocative and beautiful glass sculptures. He has captured the imagination time and again by creating objects that appear to be ancient stone or wood carvings, not the modern glass sculptures they actually are. His art speaks of human origins, myth, ancestry, and ancient civilizations. It symbolizes a harmony between humanity and nature and provides a ghost-like bond to the world around us-a world that is often forgotten, ignored, and abused. Morris gathers much of his inspiration from ancient cultures from around the world-Egyptian, Asian, Native American-all peoples who respected and admired the land they inhabited. Because of this, Morris's artwork has become something all its own: culturally distinct and yet familiar to all cultures. His pieces embody a spiritual quality that sharply contrasts old beliefs with those of the modern world. These objects speak to our senses and continuously beg us to explore them further. "William Morris: Mazorca, Objects of Common Ceremony" does just that, exhibiting Morris's most recent collections in detailed images that seemingly come to life on the page, just as his sculptures come to life in the studio.
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From Publishers Weekly
This sumptuous catalogue depicts recent blown-glass works by the glass and bronze sculptor William Morris, which have been crafted to resemble artifacts from a fictive, hybridized, ancient non-Western culture. Exhibited in collections from 2002 to 2004, these inscrutable idols, masks, figurines, rattles, vases, urns and beads are inspired by the Mesoamerican and Andean peoples of Central and South America, as Yood (William Morris: Animal/Artifact) explains in the essay that accompanies the 135 color illustrations. Close-up photographs reveal detailed texture, brilliant color and expressive body language in the statuettes. Morris's series of idols are especially evocative. A few of them suggest patient suppliants: a crouching figure, his knees drawn up under a yellow tunic, bows his head and cups a small vase like an offering or a receptacle for rain. Other idols seem more fearful than prayerful. Two orange figures with black hair wrap their arms around each other, as if before the mercy of a terrifyingly powerful force. Another black-veined yellow figure with horns sprouting from his head sits with his arms—perhaps bound—straining behind him. While Morris handles themes of spirituality and nature, his art—drawn from pre-Columbian cultures destroyed by Europeans—is also powerfully elegiac. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"The first time I saw William Morris's idols I felt an electric thrill, not only because of the incredible artistic prowess each of them represents, but also because I recognized them. It was like finally finding myself before the intangible beings I had been looking for all my life, that I had glimpsed in dreams and evoked in my writing."--from the Foreword by Isabelle Allende
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Billy Morris' amazing work,
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This review is from: William Morris: Mazorca, Objects of Common Ceremony (Hardcover)
This book is a collection of some of the amazing glass work from Billy Morris. I am a flameworking glass artist and can only dream of being able to make anything remotely similar to what you will find within the pages of this book. This is more than just a coffee table book. This is true high quality - something that you will be drawn to more than once. Billy Morris' work is beyond that of Chihuly.
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