Deborah Attwood Morris
introducing the House Series
When Catherine’s new collection, The Gunman and the Carnival, comes out next year from Baobab Press, the cover art will be this painting by Deborah Attwood Morris.
Deborah and I met in 1980 at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from 1982 through most of 1992 we lived across the hall from each other in an industrial building converted (not yet quite legally) to artist lofts in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, on the verge but not yet trendy. The local coffee shop was a Polish pierogi place (you went for pierogis, not for the coffee), the three corner stores were run by a single Palestinian family, and what is now highly developed riverfront property, with walks, parks, corporate office buildings, condos, and a ferry, was a dangerous wasteland—though a great place for watching fireworks over Manhattan on the 4th of July.
In 1992 I left Brooklyn for a teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh, while Deborah and her family stayed in the loft, where they still live today. Over these thirty years of visits and short-term stays in the city I've had the opportunity to observe the transformation of the neighborhood, as if in snapshorts, and I’ve seen up close the intimate turns and evolutions in Deborah’s work.
In this series of posts we hope to capture some of those turns, using images and conversation to share some of Deborah’s work and what goes into it.
We’ll be starting late here, with a painting from 1999 or so, and even so the works to be explored and the reflections that accompany them will offer far too much for a single post—so today’s is just an introduction, not even yet Part 1.
Bachelard’s Poetics of Space was an inspiration or provocation for this first piece and the “House Series” that grew out of it.
“What I was thinking about was the idea of the home as a safe place,” Deborah says. “I was questioning what seemed a modernist attitude that idealized architecture as a home, a place of safety ... but home’s not safe. It doesn’t work that way, it often doesn’t, and that’s where my work was heading—first into concerns about climate change and into the destruction of home—with mudslides, flooding. I did the paintings on shaped canvases or board, as distorted shapes, as though the houses were tumbling.
“This was the first one. The dark red is a significant color, because it has so much power, and the windows and doorways are black because you couldn’t see into them, or if you did, your seeing went way beyond what was present. If you look into outer space, you’re looking into this endless blackness.
“These concerns are what got the whole series going. And I was listening to NPR all the time, and just recently I realized that I’ve been working on projects for ages.”
By “projects” Deborah means a series of paintings and drawings and three-dimensional constructions that collectively explore and excavate experience around a common theme. This thematic exploration was often not intentional, becoming conscious only later, because Deborah’s attention was directed to the formal and abstracted—shape and color, dot and line.
Some examples from the House Series —
After a visit to Chaco Canyon the imagery began to change.
“Chaco Canyon is haunted,” Deborah says. “It has weight—not just because it’s hot and still. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for a very long time. I kept falling asleep in the afternoon and I saw this image of an indigenous figure and his head was shaking no and I realized that this was a place I wasn’t supposed to go into. This painting was THAT—the “no, don’t go there” is the yellow, the sense of it as fogged over.
“I think in this painting I was figuring out, trying to expel, what I was doing. It comes toward the end of the series.
“The arrows back and forth express energy and protection, and the two little shapes, the black and the green, trying to connect. The painting has this flattened house shape, and the house is not a mere house now—but the earth as our home.”
These conversations with Deborah and her paintings and other work will continue in future posts. A preview —
And in the meantime, Bandit says hello!
What a succulent idea to have a sustained dialogue about art-making through time. Friendship & creativity twining & yielding juicy insights & further leads to follow. Thanks to you both for modeling dedication to craft & sharing the journey, fruits & horizon with us.
Thank you so much for introducing us to the house series! They are amazing and all haunting in particular ways. Wow!