Sculpture Woods

Ann Morris has become a priestess of sorts, investing her mind and spirit into an ambitious oeuvre of figurative bronzes that speak with a singular and meditative voice. In a comprehensive and insightful essay, Ted Lindberg traces the arc of Morris's artistic development from her beginnings as a mother, philosophy student, and Pasadena printmaker, to her reclusion on the wind-swept bluffs of Lummi Island in north Puget Sound. There Morris has created an extraordinary bronze park that she calls Sculpture Woods, a 15-acre sanctuary of stately forest and highbank waterfront that is home to her studio and to a winding path populated by 16 sculptural tableaus seen through a Jungian lens. Monumental figures emerge from the forest, as if stepping through a rift in time from the mists of classical and Celtic antiquities, to tell their archetypal tales.

In a second essay, Jake Seniuk muses on how Morris moved from such overtly mythological themes to a kind of talismanic naturalism when she turned to an ongoing series of more intimately scaled bronzes that trace an ongoing Bone Journey. Unfolding her own creation myth through her work, Morris remains true to the marriage of the Platonic and the aboriginal, where a clear-eyed awareness of mortality is liberating and transcendent.