Joan Morris speaking at the 2014 Maiwa Textile Symposium

Joan Morris closed out the 2014 lecture series with her talk - Expressing Impossibility. There were two main themes. The first was that very little is actually impossible. As a personal challenge she set for herself, Joan Morris wanted to connect with people outside her practice and follow up on unusual leads. One such lead was to contact the US Army Corp of Engineers and speak to them about the similarity between satellite mapping imagery and her own shaped resist artwork. To her surprise the cold call let to a commission and ten years of work.

Danielle Bush introducing Joan Morris

Joan's second theme was that we all have the potential to curate our own museum exhibits. The exhibitions take place in the unlimited space of our imaginations, and they are built over our lives, staged and restaged as our conception of what is important changes. As an active museum goer who books research and study time in the collections, Joan introduced the audience to the ways that an artist might engage more fully with the incredible textiles collected in the world's institutions.

It was a lyrical and poetic lecture, filled with ideas and the stories of how these ideas played out in Joan's own artistic practice and artwork.

Detail of Joan Morris' work using a patented technique for printing gold metal on textiles.