Silk, Canvas, Paper & Stone

On September 1,2 and 3rd, Artist Gay Lynette Morris will present artworks on Silk, Canvas, Paper and Stone at her pop-up show in the Spinning Room of the Historic Harrisville Mills. The show is part new work, part retrospective and will include paintings on various surfaces, showing an evolution of subject matter as well as surface mediums.

“The show is really whatever I want to show, which is really a pleasure,” says Morris, who has spent her career catering to commercial clients and dealers.

Morris made her career on silk painting, a luscious medium that took the fashion industry by storm in the 1980s. Previously, fashion buyers had made decisions about fabric design from drawings on paper, now they could see it more dynamically, draping the body. A practice that Morris had started for its artistic expression was suddenly in commercial demand.

“Silk is lustrous and seductive and harder for buyers to resist. The colors soak into the natural fibers. It was a magic moment in history for the artists,” says Morris.

Painting on silk came naturally to Morris but figuring out sellable designs less so. The transition was one of trial and error. She recounts that one of the paintings from an early portfolio included a mission choir singing in front of a church, hardly material for textile design. And yet, another unlikely design from the same collection, including minarets and palm trees, was picked up. The success was enough to “get me paying attention,” says Morris. She started visiting museums in Boston and looking at pottery and wallpaper, anything with a surface design. Fashion was normally the last thing she thought about, but she suddenly found herself lingering in store windows studying patterns. Morris went on to sell her designs to high end companies including Liz Claiborne, Echo Scarves, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s private labels. She was also commissioned to paint 684 silk wallpaper panels for the Four Seasons in Macau. Her commercial success stretched her skillset, but she never stopped her artistic practice.

“I didn’t see it as my work,” says Morris “I wasn’t a person who was excited about polka dots and stripes.”

Morris is a native of South Wales Australia, but her work is inspired by the cultures she was exposed to while abroad as the child of missionaries. She was born in Japan at the time when it was still the norm for women to wear kimonos. The dresses were early sensory memories. The Caribbean landscape of her childhood spent in Kingston, Jamaica has been a lifelong subject exploration.

Morris still devotes a large part of her time to travel abroad. For the past few years she has returned to Porto Santo Stefano, a coastal town in Western Italy. During World War II, the port city was a strategic location for the Axis powers, and between 1934 and 1944, over 95% of the city was leveled. Still today, pieces of pottery and glass wash up on the shore that were part of homes and buildings. “For two years, I had been picking up these pieces of people’s destroyed lives,” says Morris.

Morris wasn’t sure why she was initially attracted to these pieces of pottery she would bring back in her suitcase, but the more time she spent with these fragments she realized the kinship with the collected stones from her own grieving. Morris’s sister was killed in the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers and at the attack’s first anniversary, families gathered at the site. Most gathered the rubble beneath their feet, filling bags with the pieces. Morris did the same, bringing the stones home to live on her kitchen counter.

Eventually, after spending enough time with the broken pottery she had brought back from Porto Santo Stefano, she started painting their small surfaces, miniature paintings inspired by her daily life. Each painting was a small victory. A surmountable expression of everyday beauty. The experience of working on such a small scale “liberated her” she says and inspired her to start painting on other surfaces and painting bigger.

Morris is primarily self-taught. “I’m almost uneducable,” she says “I learn best by doing.”

Instead, her experiences have served as her own compass. The spinning room, in which her work will be shown, reminds Morris of her beginnings as a young artist at the Piano Factory in Boston, subsidized housing for artists housed in an old baby grand piano factory. The raw wood floors, the ceiling height, all made Morris feel at home once again. The old still in conversation with the new. Each piece, both itself and part of a larger story, just like the paintings in Morris’s show.

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