‘We don’t value the arts enough’
Julia Morison didn’t need to give much thought to whether or not to accept her latest accolade. The Christchurch artist has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours, arguably the highest recognition of a 40-year career.
‘‘Anything that promotes the arts is a really good thing,’’ she said.
‘‘We have so much but we actually don’t acknowledge it too often because it’s difficult to evaluate. We can evaluate our sportspeople because they either win or they lose . . . but with an artist there aren’t any winners or losers. It’s just different. People doing different things.’’
Plenty of her contemporaries would have been worthy recipients of official recognition, she said.
‘‘I’m really honoured that someone thinks that my work is deserving. I know a lot of artists that have turned [honours] down. It may be anti-royalist, it might be political. I don’t know.’’
Morison’s paintings have been exhibited extensively since the early 1980s, but it is her public artworks since the Christchurch earthquakes that have brought her most prominence. Her response to the disaster, the sculpture exhibition Meet Me on the Other Side, made from discarded objects and liquefaction sediment, won widespread acclaim. Her Tree Houses for Swamp Dwellers sculpture on the corner of Gloucester and Colombo streets, a reference to the pre-European landscape of Christchurch, was for a time the headquarters of the Scape Public Art festival.
‘‘I had no interest at all in making public sculpture before [the earthquakes],’’ Morison said.
‘‘The public sculpture I make, it’s more than just spectacle. They’re kind of social facilitators, I suppose. Tree Houses . . . There’s been weddings in there, poetry readings, people just sit and have their lunch in it. That’s the kind of thing that I had hoped for it.’’
Public art could be a difficult medium, she said. She pursued the idea for Tree Houses herself before Scape picked it up. Subsequent applications for commissions had gone nowhere, she said, including on the ill-fated government plan for an ‘‘art bridge’’ over the Avon River. Crown regeneration agency O¯ ta¯ karo led the project, which was put on indefinite hold when it was found it didn’t fit with development plans for the area. A ‘‘shocking waste of time and money’’, Morison said, but she retained high hopes for the future of public art in Christchurch.
‘‘I’d love to see more projects and I think we need them to make the city interesting. They talk about tourists coming in and activation of the city centre. Art is extremely useful in doing that, as Melbourne found out. The cities that have invested in it haven’t had any regrets about doing that.’’
"I'd love to see more projects and I think we need them to make the city interesting . . . The cities that have invested in [art] haven't had any regrets about doing that." Julia Morison, Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit