Ivan Morley

Ivan Morley describes his paintings as “poetic myth objects”. Drawing from the Wild West ancestry of his hometown in California, Morley’s works – which range from folk-style illustration to full-fledged abstraction – combine fact and more than a little historical embellishment in their narrative motifs. Using such unorthodox materials as thread, glass, fabric, batik, soap, and KY Jelly, Morley uses the associative and ‘make do’ qualities of his media to give authenticity to his work as handcrafted ‘artefacts’. Morley’s A True Tale is a monumental embroidered wall-hanging. Depicting an ‘impressionistic’ view of a romantic frontier landscape through home-craft, Morley draws upon the connotations of the American sublime, his painting becoming an inspiring testimony to heartfelt endeavour and heartland chintz.

Ivan Morley’s Tehachepi takes its title from the name of a small town near Fresno California, in which a ranch was recently purchased to be the site of a Norbertine convent; a true contemporary story, which in Morley’s hands harks back to the days of untamed savage territories yet to be conquest. Rendered over the lustrous sheen of aluminium sheeting, Morley’s abstract pattern is made from cloth and oil paint. Rendered with comic detail, each round form is given anthropomorphic effect. Idiosyncratic and naïve, his TexMex coloured swatches flock in huddled congregation, each an intrinsic, yet individual value of the whole.