Gallery 119

Laura Morrison
Fiber Artist

Morrison is a mixed media and fiber artist who enjoys handwork and often incorporates free-form crochet, embroidery, needle felting and hand beading into her art. She has taken on a new direction in her work working with fiber in a more sculptural way, incorporating recycled wool sweaters and blankets into much of her work.

Her process always begins with a question to tackle aboug whatever might be puzzling or troubling her at the moment. It could be Prejudice, Feminism, Global Warming, Suburban Sprawl, Motherhood, or Plastic Surgery. Her current body of work that will be presented at the Affordable Art Fair comes from The Nature Regeneration Series, that ponders the future of Nature with or without the presence of humanity.

She has developed an oeuvre that is unique in the artworld and some of her work has a sense of both attraction and repulsion, a favorite approach of Gallery 119. She is an active member and leader of the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA) and the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts, just two of her advocate roles for the arts.

http://www.lauramorrisonart.com/gallery_fiber.htm

Laura Morrison is a mixed media artist with a passion for fiber! Her new work takes traditional fiber art techniques and gives them a new spin by creating contemporary sculpture based on natural forms. Morrison’s fiber of choice is wool in the form of yarn, felted wool sweaters and wool roving. Her pieces are created using crochet, knitting, needle felting, beading and embroidery.

She has shown her work in galleries throughout New Hampshire and the Northeast. In 2008 she created a temporary public art sculpture for the “Nature and Balance” exhibition at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA. Her piece, “Mother Pod” was a large and colorful fiber art sculpture resembling a mother seed pod and her baby pod created from recycled wool sweaters embellished with wool embroidery and needle felting. More of Morrison’s public art can be seen at the MacRury Hall Dental Building on the NHTI campus in Concord, NH. Her large series of site specific, mixed media paintings entitled, “Smile, Breathe, Sing, Talk and Taste” and “Laugh, Giggle, Grin” were commissioned by the NH Percent for Art program.

Morrison earned a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked as a graphic designer for several years in Chicago before moving to New Hampshire. The move created a space for change and she refocused her creative energy towards making mixed media collages and assemblages. Over time, she started incorporating more fiber into her work and has recently switched into working almost entirely with fiber. Morrison explains the change, “I love the fact that I can create what I need entirely out of my imagination and I don’t have to search for the perfect item to incorporate into a collage or assemblage. All I need is a ball of yarn and a crochet needle to get started on a new sculpture. It’s very freeing.”

Having grown up just outside of Chicago, Morrison appreciates the art and culture of the big city, but she says that the move with her family to New Hampshire changed her life, “I truly love Chicago. It’s a gorgeous, incredible city. The art is abundant and has made a huge impression on my life. However, moving to New Hampshire opened my eyes to the more important beauty of nature and wild, open spaces. Here, I can truly breathe deeply and be the artist and person I want to be.”