Echo, Planetarium Installation

blink, Installation

Windows, Painting Installation

Not Yet Written In Stars, Handmade Book

Artist Statement, Liz Morrison

There are pictures in the sky; they are formed by lines drawn between specks of light, all that is visible from the giants who live far away. They outline humans and gods and their scattered stories. The lines are drawn with your mind, a machine to find connections where once there was only a vacuum–infinite emptiness between infrequent specks–to make pictures and draw their meanings, bringing the stick figures to life; you are touching the heavens, by weaving your narrative into the space between: constellations.

The construction of constellations is something uniquely and beautifully human. We connect the chaotic dots in the night sky to make pictures that tell stories to help everyday life function. 15,000 years ago, painters depicted the coming of spring on cave walls by mapping the relationship between Taurus and the Pleiades in the sky. Ancient civilizations have used constellations to navigate the sea, chart calendars, and anticipate seasonal changes.

My work creates a parallel experience to the traditional function of constellations. Visual artwork and text first appear to be chaotic, but meaning emerges as the viewer is able to project significance into the embedded shapes. An invented constellation appears out of the chaos, and with it, a poetic message. 

Consider the popular, astronomical definition of a constellation as the imaginary lines drawn between relatively bright stars that appear close to one another. My work uses these imaginary lines to connect words that are scattered in space to form phrases and dots drawn into night skies to form letters. Concrete poetry interprets the idea of a constellation to mean a single-word poem whose syntax is created by spatial connections.  This definition is also present in the language of my work, which scatters words on the wall like stars in the sky. Linguistic structure emerges as the viewer draws lines in space to connect words and phrases.

The construction of constellations echoes the artist’s function: to look at the chaos of life and, somehow, construct from it a meaningful story. The imagination to draw lines between chaotic stars in the sky is the same imagination that makes connections in life, called art. The story of creativity lies in between the stars, where we are able to draw meaning out of the apparent randomness.