Heather and Ivan Morison: Blueprint for Happy Endings

En route to Plaza, the new installation by UK duo Heather and Ivan Morison, I’m feeling a rush of anticipation, as if a carnival midway has unexpectedly sprung up overnight in downtown Vancouver. First, Ivan Morison has to make a slight detour to the dry cleaner for the three-piece tweed suit he’ll wear at tonight’s opening.

“Our projects are a bit like a circus that comes to town and then just up and leaves,” acknowledges Morison, whose works grapple with the territory of memory construction as much as the use of raw materials. “I was raised in a small town and the travelling carnival would take over the entire town. It was sad when they left. The site would be barren and have this lonely, windblown feeling.” Morison wasn’t tempted to run away with the circus performers—he says, “I wish I had thought of that!”—but he and his wife Heather’s collaborations are inspired by that early fascination with temporary structures that have the power to transform banal landscapes and environments, serve as a gathering place for locals and then disappear again overnight, leaving behind an imprint in the imagination.

“In the last couple of years, we’ve built our projects like a barn raising,” says Morison as we approach the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite venue, which is next door to the Shangri-La, Vancouver’s tallest building. “The construction team gets bigger and bigger and for the final push you have this huge team of locals. It’s a great way for a work to find its way into a place.” In this case, the team included an eclectic mix of artists and labourers from theatre set designers the Great Northern Way Scene Shop and volunteers from BladeRunners, a non-profit that works with at-risk youth in the Downtown Eastside. “They’ve been fantastic,” says Morison, who typically participates in the entire building process—though for this project, he and Heather couldn’t be present during the middle phase.

While I’ve experienced none of the Morisons’ works in the flesh, some of my favourites viewed online include a giant, black wooden cloud, a monolithic steel dinosaur (constructed by former employees of a defunct Serbian Yugo factory), huge wooden kites, a crashed truck that spills a heap of flowers, skywritings, a mobile science fiction library, a cozy geodesic dome in which a host serves tea and whispers, “I’m sorry, goodbye,” and their latest project, a travelling puppet-theatre caravan in Tasmania.

These pieces are meant to provoke, tilt and mystify the viewer, but they’re not conjuror’s tricks that merely delight, confuse and even misdirect. “Our goal is always about transformation, bringing about some sort of change within a community, preparing them for future hard times and realizing they can build and achieve something together,” says Morison, who is fine with the fact that the acclimation process sometimes includes vandalism. “People have to learn to accept anything. But these works often became theirs. Here in Vancouver, the main concern was that the homeless people would use it. But it’s a room without a roof, the material [wood sourced from locally requisitioned lumber and then burned using a Japanese preservation technique] is black and you might get dirty; I wouldn’t want to sleep there. But I might want to take a kick at the walls.”

Now we’ve passed under Shangri-La’s long, thin shadow and here is Plaza, a trapezoid-like box with no top, made of slats of burned wood and shored internally by many huge criss-crosses of untreated wood girders. The walls lean out into the street and the entire effect is at once that of a precarious old structure at risk of collapsing and that of a time machine, hovering mysteriously, its entrance ramp inviting. You feel its seductive pull, but what will happen if you go inside? Maybe it’s the scale and the dark, glowing richness of the wood that reminds me of the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I feel like a monkey transfixed, scratching my head.

The Morisons are fascinated with crystals and the uncanny power that all organic materials have to impart wisdom and transport you through time and space, and they’re also influenced by science fiction novels, so Ivan likes my interpretation. “Great book, that. Plaza has a combination of influences, primarily a line from a J.G. Ballard short story: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’” The Morisons often reference Ballardian themes like the alienating and violent forces of modern architecture. (Later, at the unveiling, Morison will read the opening paragraph of High Rise.) “But Plaza is not meant to be an apocalyptic vision at all, and it’s not a literal example of how architecture should change, but the idea that it is possible to change.”

Plaza’s place among the drab postmodern glass buildings underlines an urgency to do just that. “Look at these buildings,” says Morison. “They’re huge and quite ugly; they’re built for being inside your luxury box, going into yourself, not connecting with each other. It seems overwhelming to think of how we’re going to tear these things down. What is the future of these buildings? Of us? But I’m not a pessimist. Maybe our projects take away my anxieties, but we think of Plaza as a blueprint for happiness. That the world can be reconfigured and become more beautiful, yeah? Into something that better suits our true needs.”