As I stepped into Graham Contemporary for the launch of Jennifer Morrison’s latest exhibition, Vortex, I was met with an explosion of colour. The walls were lined with canvases of every size, each radiating energy through frenzied brushstrokes and stoic, deliberate forms. Beside me, gallery owner and founder Graham Britz scanned the room. Then I saw her: clad in a bright yellow satin bomber jacket, a cotton-candy pink shirt and painterly blue trousers. Jennifer Morrison is, in essence, a reflection of her art. Vivid, layered, and alive.
Born in SA and now based in London, Vortex marks Morrison’s sixth exhibition in her 12-year collaboration with Graham Contemporary. Known for her abstract style, she constantly pushes the boundaries of texture, scale, colour and movement, creating pieces that invite emotional interpretation rather than prescribing meaning.
“I am less concerned with narrative than with experience,” she tells me. “I want viewers to step into the work and feel the turbulence, the flow, the pulse of energy.”
And that energy is inescapable. Quick, animated brushstrokes spiral organically across the canvas, brought to life through deft touches of shadow and light. The result is a whirlpool of colour, its vitality offset by the sharp, geometric shapes that slice through it. In Energy, strokes of pink, red and coral seem to breathe, pulsing with Morrison’s movement. Then, a layer of turquoise, pink and navy spirals, retro and precise, cuts across the chaos. The juxtaposition of freedom and order, of three-dimensionality and flatness, has a striking effect.
“I like the wild and the free and the emotional,” Morrison explains, “but I also like the ordered, the organised, the precise. With these paintings, I wanted to see what would happen if I brought these two languages together. How do they speak to each other, and what are they saying together?”
As we sit in the open expanse of Graham Contemporary, surrounded by her work, Morrison describes her process as deeply intuitive, an experience guided by instinct and rhythm. “The way I work is much more subconscious. I found myself making these vortex-like shapes, despite myself,” she says. The process, she explains, feels almost spiritual, akin to psychography, or “spirit writing”, where one channels without conscious control.
“The paintings almost paint themselves. You’re there and not there at the same time, a strange hovering feeling. You’re in control, but not. It’s a very fine balance.”
The greatest risk, she admits, lay in that tension between chaos and control. The vortex forms always came first. “I do that whole energetic part of the painting, using my whole body in very quick marks until it feels right. Then the idea came to superimpose this rigid pattern on top,” she recalls. “It could have completely ruined the painting, but I gave it a go and something very interesting happened.”
Despite the unrestrained energy in her process, Morrison’s practice is anchored in routine. From her London studio, she works with clear boundaries between creation and distraction. “I probably start painting within 10 minutes of getting in. I don’t research or read there, and I don’t have a computer in the studio. I even have to stand with my phone out the door to get one bar of Wi-Fi,” she says, smiling. “The studio is a making space, and I work quickly.”
In many ways, her rituals mirror the duality within Vortex, a rhythmic collision of the subconscious and the deliberate. “When I start a painting, I almost fool myself into thinking I’m not going to do anything else,” she says with a laugh, her British lilt softening her SA accent. “I suspend the idea of the precise pattern so the expressive part can work in its own right. Only then do I begin to think about the next step. That process is new every time. I have to rethink how I want the painting to end, what to place next to what already exists. That’s what makes it exciting.”
So too are the interpretations of her work, and that, Morrison insists, is precisely the point. “I’ve always been drawn to abstraction because I love its openness,” she says. “I love that it’s elusive, that it doesn’t answer all your questions. For me, looking at art is a visual experience and with abstraction, that’s what it’s purely about. I find that to be a very beautiful thing.”
The Vortex exhibition runs at Graham Contemporary until November 15.
