Jennifer Lee Morrow:
Stories
Moonlight Dancing, mixed media, 19" x 20", sold
Jennifer Lee Morrow’s career as an artist has evolved in much the same way as any one of her multi-media artworks. At the Rhode Island School of Design, she was drawn to textile design, and learned to sew. She made clothing and quilts: some as art, some purely functional . She liked putting together different shapes, colors and textures. She liked the long hours of focused labor that the work demanded, and as her constructions took on multiple layers, she discovered she had stories to tell through the work.
When she discovered paper-making, her work went in a new direction. She could create different degrees of translucence, softness and stability. Colors could be created by incorporating various materials into the paper itself. Like textiles, the paper could be stitched together and layered, but she had a new control over the material, and could manipulate it in surprising ways.
As a graduate student at Kansas, she again studied textile design, but focused on sculpture, the closest thing to what she was already doing. Just as various materials were blended into the paper she made, found materials became part of her sculptures, sometimes woven-in like another strand of fiber, sometimes as a more central part of the story.
Morrow moved to Deer Isle in 1991. For the past seventeen years, her art has been woven and layered with her life, and it shows in her work. The stories are there. The list of her pieces reads like a table of contents. Recurring themes surface again and again: the past and present like parallel fibers. Like most good stories, there’s something left out that we know is there. You can almost touch it, but don’t rely on the storyteller-artist to do the work for you. Her work invites the viewer in for a closer look, to discover secrets hidden beneath layers or inside alcoves. There’s no easy resolution, no formulaic plot, and perhaps no real ending. You may look inside Morrow’s work and find a reflection, a mirror, or an object that suggests only more questions, but those are qualities that make stories endure.