Installation view of Anna at Hepworth Wakefield, 2012.

Ivan and Heather Morison: Survival Instinct

Viewers familiar with the British artists Ivan and Heather Morison expect their work to elicit a sense of unease. Anna, a piece of object theater installed in their 2012 Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, showcased their diversity of media and approaches. The installation stretched across scales—from a large, floating balloon tied to a floor-bound wooden stool, a carefully crafted bench, and large-scale wall works to cast concrete planks scattered across the floor, several doubling as low dais for smaller works (including a goose egg carved from chalk; wax, bone ash, and china flowers; and bone-like sculpted miniatures whose blackened bodies reinforced the general sense of unease). Each component served an allegorical function in a story by Anna Kavan, the literary alter ego of Helen Ferguson. Ferguson/Kavan was a 20th-century writer, whose reputation centered…see the entire article in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.