Mazorca: Objects Of Common Ceremony - Hardcover

Morris, William; Allende, Isabel; Yood, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0974420255 ISBN 13: 9780974420257

Publisher: Marquand Books Inc, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

James Yood teaches modern and contem-porary art history and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes regularly for Artforum, American Craft, and Glass magazines. Among his books are William Morris: Animal/Artifact and William Morris: Man Adorned. Isabel Allende is one of Latin America's foremost writers.

Reviews

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.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Marquand Books Inc
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0974420255
• ISBN 13: 9780974420257
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 167