Holly Morrison, Artist 1998 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS
Users of the new Stokes wing of the Cleveland Public Library often have their initial encounter with Morrison’s work when they visit the Northwest Tower, where her site-specific mural, The Golden Game, floats, rebus-like, from the ceiling onto the walls, shading from blue to purple through reds and yellows, shimmering with gold and silver flake. Offering her own (very postmodern) interpretation of medieval alchemical texts in the library’s special collections, with an array of mystical emblems organized in a cruciform chessboard pattern, Morrison has provided readers with surroundings highly conducive to a stimulating research experience.
Simultaneously, by hanging poetic views of Lake Erie on an opposite wall, she invited us to consider our locale from the more obvious (yet also often overlooked) angle of the natural horizon. As her work has matured, we have had the opportunity to see Morrison’s distinct creative patterns develop. Frequently centering on the resolution of opposites, she has striven to dissipate arbitrary distinctions: between differing media, between realism and abstraction, harmony and dissonance, external and internal, embodiment and intangibility. Like the alchemists she admires, Holly Morrison effects physical transformations which seem to radiate an aura of the spiritual. —Ellen G. Landau |
Cleveland Arts Prize
P.O. Box 21126 • Cleveland, OH 44121 • 440-523-9889 • info@clevelandartsprize.org