ABOUT THE ARTIST

Beverly Morris is a New Orleans ceramic artist who was born in New York City and raised in New Hampshire, Florida and Mexico. She graduated from Tulane University with a degree in Political Science and worked for The Times-Picayune for 15 years as an award-winning copywriter and creative director.

She studied painting and drawing with her stepmother, Jan Dolan-Morris, a well-known portrait and landscape artist in the Northeast; and with Professor Pat Trivigno while at Tulane. In 1991 she began to work with the medium of clay. Morris was immediately drawn to the process of hand-building preferring its imperfect soul, asymmetry and indelible imprint of the artist.

“Singing Over the Bone”, her fourth solo show, was inspired by the ideas in Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes book "Women Who Run with the Wolves." Originally published in 1992, it is as relevant today as it was two decades ago for both women and men.  As a Jungian analyst and 'cantadora' (storyteller), she explores various feminine archetypes through fairy tales, myth and oral histories from around the world. Her writing is about reconnecting with what she calls our wildish natures - by fully embracing both Life and its opposite.

The Inuit story of "Skeleton Woman" explores our relentless pursuit of love relationships while fully rejecting any type of death within them.  She uses death in a figurative sense - the death of illusions about another within that relationship. And only through full acceptance of both sides of a partner, the pretty and the not so pretty - along with a gentle untangling of a partner's most unattractive side - can we realize a true love relationship.

Of the story, she writes:  "It is true that within a single love relationship there are many endings. Yet somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins…We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one's existence has been cut down to the bones."

Through this show, I hope to reconnect the viewer with that instinctual nature which is no longer cut off from the outside world but a part of it. To be able to observe the beauty of an oak leaf or broken shell, revealing an exquisite interior, is a part of recognizing our intrinsic wildish natures.

The artist's website: www.beverlymorrisart.com