ELISSA MORLEY BIO
ELISSA MORLEY
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Elissa Morley is an artist currently dividing her time between Central Florida and Indianapolis.
After graduating with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England, she taught in many institutions of higher education in Central Kentucky. She received a Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant in 2009, the Great Meadows Artist Professional Development Grant in 2020, and has art in a number of private collections.
EDUCATION
P.G.C.E. 2004 Secondary Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London, England
M. F. A. 2001 Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England
B. A. 1998 Art, Minor in English, Asbury University, Wilmore, Kentucky (Cum Laude)
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024, Elissa Morley, Design Lab, Kittles Furniture, Indianapolis, Indiana
2022, Dream House, Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky
2019, Dream House, Asbury University Art Gallery, Wilmore, Kentucky
2017, Delights: Bathing in Another World, The Living Arts and Science Center, Lexington, Kentucky
2015, Delights: Bathing in Another World, Ann Tower Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky
2011, Fountain: A Place for Tears, Lexington Art League, Lexington, Kentucky
2010-2011, Vision: Things That Fly, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio
2006, Elissa Morley, Tuska Center of Contemporary Art, Lexington, Kentucky
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025, OKI: Regional Exhibition, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
2024, Art. Life. Design: The Way We Live Now, Art League Rhode Island, Pawtucket, RI
2024, Dwellings, Art LInk Gallery, Ft. Wayne, Indiana
2024, The Real Teal, Harrison Center for the Arts, Indianapolis, Indiana
2024 Art in the Heartland, Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, Indiana
2024 Muse Collective, Woodland Art Fair, Lexington, Kentucky
2010, Alternate Selves, Lexington Art League, Lexington, Kentucky
2010, Drawing On, Tuska Center for Contemporary Art, Lexington, Kentucky
2008, Anonymne, Drawing Exhibition, Berlin, Germany
2007, 50th Chautauqua National Exhibition of American Art, Chautauqua, New York
2007, Generation Next, The Loudon House, LexArts, Lexington, Kentucky
PRIZES, AWARDS, SCHOLARSHIPS, GRANTS, RESIDENCIES
2020, Artist Professional Development Grants, Great Meadows Foundation, Lousiville, KY
2009, Artist Enrichment Grant, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Louisville, KY
2007, Roberta and Jack McKibbon Award for Painting, Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts. NY
2001, The Steer Prize, Slade School of Fine Art, London, England
2001, Young Artist Exhibition Award, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, England
2001, The Gissings Limited Purchase Award, London, England
2000, Travel Bursary (Russia), University College London
SELECTED WORK IN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Mr. and Mrs. Moffatt, Santa Barbara, CA
Gissings Limited, London, England
Mr. and Mrs. Wayne, Cincinnati, Ohio
Ms. Carolyn Sesbeau, New York, New York
Dr. Alyson P. Newton, Washington, D.C.
Dr. Tabitha Zimmerman, Phoenix, Arizona
Mrs. Cathy and Tuck Ferrell, Indialantic, Florida
REVIEWS
Christine Huskisson, A Delightful Bath, Under Main, March 2015,
https://undermain.art/visual-arts/elissa-morley/
Selena Reder, Movement, Stillness and War, City Beat, Jan 31, 2011
https://www.citybeat.com/arts-culture/visualarts/article/13012580/movement-stillness-and-war
Shannon Eblen, ‘Drawing On’ Experience, LexGo, Lexington Herald Leader, Jan 14, 2010, https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/visual-arts/article44020506.html
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work employs translucent materials such as watercolor, layered tracing paper and wax to evoke the atmospheric qualities of light. This enables me to explore the phenomenology of spaces both domestic and contemplative.
Layering materials both conceals and reveals forms, suggesting dimension and history.
Small works often lead me to make larger installations or sculptures, but I continually return to the two-dimensional surface.
April 21, 2015
On some basic level, every exhibition is an opportunity to contemplate and maybe even escape a little. Delights: Bathing in Another World – Paintings and Sculptures by Elissa Morley on display at the Ann Tower Gallery through May 10th gives us the chance to immerse and discover.
Morley’s twelve watercolor and graphite drawings, along with seven hanging tissue sculptures transform this gallery, now located on the second floor of the Downtown Arts Center in Lexington, Kentucky, into something quite unique. To visit is almost as though you were stepping into the illusions Morley depicts within each of her poplar frames.
Central themes in her work are quietude and contemplation. In this space, Morley successfully asks us to relinquish momentarily the known world overrun by the mating call of Twitter, push notifications from Facebook, and the ever-present ephemerality of Instagram. Rarely alone long enough to contemplate our surroundings and what we are doing within them, we take little time to consider how our actions might impact this world – or even worse – that while forever caught in the flutter we do nothing to alter any of it.
Morley’s Alexander Calder-esque mobiles hung from the ceiling
make no sounds as they react to our movements within the gallery. Initially this is a very calming sensation. On deeper contemplation, the soft, tattered tissue shapes like that in Blue, White, Pink Wings – tenuously held together with wire – might be remnants of something we once knew, something that is now only moments away from falling apart entirely. Other works like Yellow Wings hang so low that they occasionally penetrate the viewer’s personal space beckoning us to reconsider our complacent gaze.
Within the framed objects hung along four walls, pacific blues, wisteria purples, and persimmon oranges painted on tracing paper – sewn together in multiple layers – blur any overt intent or heavy import. Yet their presence in this multi-media installation encourages deeper inquiry. Fields of multiform abstractions are punctuated with architectural elements and the occasional tree-like shape as though to signal some specific place, a place not yet known as in a drawing or idea that is still churning in the mind and at the hand of its creator.
But there is a creator at work, one who resists the confinement of others’ imagined boundaries perhaps but is still mindful and present. Stepping into and back out of these drawings allows us to renew our perceptions of this world by bathing briefly and delightfully in another. Delights: Bathing in Another World Paintings and Sculpture by Elissa Morley is on view through May 10, 2015 and is well worth a visit.
Elissa Morley attended Asbury University and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. She has lived in Lexington for several years, teaching at Georgetown College, Eastern Kentucky University and Asbury University. She is also a recipient of a 2009 Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant.
Christine Huskissonhttp://christinehuskisson.art
Christine Huskisson is Co-Publisher of UnderMain, Co-Founder of the Studio Visits Project and Critical Mass Series. She is also a Contemporary Portraitist interested in interiority.
Downtown’s Weston gallery presents three strong, divergent exhibitions
By Selena Reder
Jan 31, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Critic's Pick
Dennis Harrington, director of downtown’s Weston Art Gallery, looks for connections when he brings artists together for exhibition. This time, however, he did not find a common thread linking artists Diana Duncan Holmes, Elissa Morley and Todd Reynolds, whose work is now on display. So there’s no need to overexert yourself in search of a common theme. Enjoy each exhibit for its individual mastery.
“I’ve always played with movement, chance and light,” Holmes says, speaking by phone. Holmes says that she was struck by the austere landscape of Reykjavik, Iceland, during a month-long residency. She describes an environment of green moss, blue lagoons, black lava fields and white glaciers.
“It made me want to go into my subject matter almost at the cellular level,” Holmes says.
This became the impetus for her current exhibition of digital photographs Movement, Chance, Light. She moves her lens in so close it obscures her subjects to abstraction. From this vantage, a wadded up tissue is bursting with expression, like folds of drapery on a Bernini sculpture. If there is any fear of photography stealing the soul, than she traps the spirit of journal pages, blown-out tires and rust, exposing their innermost character.
The work is almost synesthetic. “Abstract #3 (journal pages),” a 12-panel photo on aluminum, vibrates with musicality. The simultaneous contrast between the white of the pages and the black between pages creates a flicker effect if you stare long enough.
In “Blowouts,” the frayed remnants of blown-out tires have new life in an eight-panel photograph. They look like the bare limbs of trees silhouetted in a lightning storm. They are writhing and dangerous. “They are hard and horrible when you pick them up on the highway,” Holmes says. And yet she thinks of them as underwater. They do the slow dance of submerged hair. There is movement everywhere in her large photographs and yet Holmes views the exhibit with a sense of calm.
Reynolds’ Utopia shares the dark undertones of artists who lived through persecution and genocide. Chief among these influences is Francisco Goya, whose Los Caprichos etchings were shown recently at the Taft Museum. Reynolds’ painting “A Baker Bakes His Cake” is a commentary on the cutthroat nature of the art world. The artist is a court jester, slumped on the floor with his little pallet and brush. He is modeled after “The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra” by Diego Velázquez, the Spanish master painter. Depicting the artist as a fool is a familiar motif in Goya’s Los Caprichos. In one instance Goya depicts the artist as a monkey painting a portrait of a donkey.
A small painting in Reynolds’ Fish Eaters series plays off of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.” Like Goya’s monster gorging on human flesh, a bald man (possibly Reynolds himself), stuffs an entire fish in his mouth. Both paintings elicit disgust.
“Sleepwalker” is Reynolds’ horrific take on modern war. A girl screams as the soldiers who raped her cover their ears; four hounds of hell stand guard. The dogs are all appropriated from the paintings of Velázquez, including “Las Meninas.” No longer benign pets of princesses, the canines are the watchdogs of war’s atrocities. A nude man, the gatekeeper of hell, holds one of the dogs on a leash. The girl’s pale white flesh echoes the peasant in a glowing white shirt of Goya’s famous “The Third of May,” which depicts the execution of Madrid citizens by Napoleon’s troops. Like Goya, Reynolds’ scene is sharply illuminated as if by stage lighting, turning the theatre of war into a violent play we watch from the audience.
Morley’s Vision: Things That Fly on the street-level gallery is a realm of stillness and renewal. Her landscape on translucent vellum spans much of the window space. Pinks and blues predominate, as do swimming pools, tropical plants, butterflies and sailing vessels, all depicted in two-dimensional and sculptural forms.
Movement is hinted at everywhere in her work. It is in the limbs of her faceless swimmers and the fluttering butterfly wings, yet the work is so calm as to have a deadening effect. The swimmers, who writhe in an undulating bay, are almost corpselike. The video of fluttering butterflies projected on the wall is on a loop. The insects repeat their dance again and again as if trapped in a jar.
As I was standing with Harrington in this eerie calm, the door opened. In walked assistant director Kelly O’Donnell with a burst of air that whipped through the gallery. The tops of the drawings are affixed to the wall but their bottoms flail with the sound of noisy wrapping paper.
“We’re going to get the blowing effect in here,” Harrington says.
By Shannon Eblen - Contributing Art Writer
Updated November 10, 2015 9:36 AM
Forget taking a step back to admire the work. You will want to lean in and take a closer look at these drawings.
For the next month, the Tuska Center for Contemporary Art at the University of Kentucky will show the works of four artists — three from Kentucky and one from Tennessee — who have created drawings that combine fantasy with great technical execution.
The artists in Drawing On show a diverse range of work that extends the boundaries of drawing, but they share common subject: otherworldly imagery.
Elissa Morley uses layered tracing paper and intense watercolors to express her fantasy world, in which buildings are architectural dreams and people are "so vulnerable that they bear no skin," as she writes in her statement.
The larger pieces have a depth provided by the sheer layers of paper that really draw the viewer into the scene. The work has been left unframed, and Morley says that gives "the sense that the work flutters and floats visionlike upon the wall."
The other three artists also use unconventional methods they have spent years perfecting.
Lawrence Tarpey produces pieces so tightly executed that it is difficult to fully understand his process. Painstakingly scratching lines out of smooth oil layers and drawing in minute details, he said he gets lost in each piece and "kind of let the process dictate how things progress."
The finished works are modern and subtle, with forms reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. All are small-scale and use Tarpey's unique process.
Tarpey has exhibited in past group shows with another artist featured in Drawing On, Michael Goodlett.
Goodlett displays painstaking detail in his large shadowboxes filled with folded, rolled and cut bits of paper. Almost every piece of paper is decorated with sketches and writing.
The writing, he says, comes from "a stream-of-consciousness diary" that became such a habit that he began to roll up all of the papers and use them in his art. At a distance, the paper layers, studded with beads and decorated with ink, take on a more general image. However, it's worth more serious study to find the hidden details, such as the hallway that takes shape behind a paper bloom, and other deeply nestled sketches.
Mark Hosford's work also requires careful attention to fully appreciate his smooth graphite detailing.
Kate Sprengnether, director of the Tuska Center, says she had never met Hosford, of Nashville, but knew of him, was impressed by the work on his Web site, www.sugarboypress.com, and decided he would be a good fit for the show.
"Just like Lawrence's work, the incredible, delicate detail really pulls the viewer in," Sprengnether says.
Hosford's drawings are unique and striking, complex at close range yet stark and simple from a distance.
Working from the 10 classic Rorschach inkblots, Hosford used a computer to fade them to a light gray, and he printed them onto drawing paper.
Hosford then drew the image in graphite over the gray space, based on the forms he sees in the inkblot, "trying not to overanalyze what I'm seeing," he says. Hosford says he hadn't seen the other artists' work yet in person, but he thought he shared with them the tendency "to have a lot of unconscious flow as to how the imagery comes about."
That, and remarkable drawing skills.
"As much as I can in this space," Sprengnether said, "I want to show the work of local artists because we have extraordinary local artists."
This story was originally published January 14, 2010 at 9:48 AM.
