2024–25, Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park, Norwich, UK
Reapers I-III
A work by Ivan Morison
Hemp, straw, bean stalks, tomato plants, hay, coppiced timber, sheep’s wool, lime and clay
Three sculptures, each 6 m high
Developed through the research residency Towards the Weird Heart of Things
Co-commissioned by Sainsbury Centre and Orleans House Gallery
Curated by John Kenneth Paranada
Reapers I–III were three monumental, hayrick-like sculptures installed across the parkland surrounding the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia. Built from agricultural matter gathered from East Anglian farms, the figures appeared shaggy, bodily and unstable. They could be understood as stacks, shrines, deteriorating monuments or dark presences moving across the landscape.
The works emerged from Morison’s research residency Towards the Weird Heart of Things. The residency became an important point of departure in his practice, bringing together material research, ecological time, bodily encounter and the agricultural landscape. It established a method that has continued through subsequent sculptures: extended periods of looking and listening, followed by the translation of social and material relationships into large-scale form.
The research began with the recognition that, throughout much of Britain, what is described as the natural world is an agricultural landscape shaped by human intervention. Rather than approaching the rural as a stable or picturesque category, Morison considered it as a radical site of inquiry, marked by environmental damage, economic pressure and the search for alternative ways of living and working with land.
He visited farmers and land workers operating at the experimental edges of contemporary agriculture. Time was spent walking their land, discussing farming systems and encountering the crops, tools, animals and materials particular to each farm. These visits were documented through medium-format photography and writing, creating a record of both the agricultural landscape and the individuals working within it.
The residency explored the parallels between the lives of artists and farmers. Both can constitute an identity as much as an occupation. Both require forms of situated knowledge, improvisation and long-term commitment. Both are also caught within distorted economic systems, dependent upon external markets, funding structures and organisations that exert considerable control over how they work.
This research took place within the Sainsbury Centre’s curatorial season Why Do We Take Drugs? Morison extended the question into agriculture, considering the industry’s dependence upon pesticides, herbicides and other chemical interventions. He encountered a system in which farmers may be instructed to use products supplied by the same multinational companies that shape the wider pharmaceutical economy.
“It’s the pharmaceutical companies and agribusinesses. These same companies sell the herbicides and pesticides that farmers need, often under strict instructions from agronomists who work for these companies. It’s an addictive, broken system that’s very hard for farmers to escape. Some have managed to break free, but the parallels to pharmaceutical drug dependency are striking. It’s uncanny that the same companies are involved in both sectors.”
Ivan Morison, reflecting on Towards the Weird Heart of Things, 2024
Published by Sainsbury Centre
Alongside the farm visits, Morison held private and public life-drawing sessions with farmers. These introduced another kind of attention into the research. The working body became a source of knowledge, carrying the pressures, habits and physical intelligence of agricultural labour.
The works emerged from Morison’s research residency Towards the Weird Heart of Things. The residency became an important point of departure in his practice, bringing together material research, ecological time, bodily encounter and the agricultural landscape. It established a method that has continued through subsequent sculptures: extended periods of looking and listening, followed by the translation of social and material relationships into large-scale form.
The research began with the recognition that, throughout much of Britain, what is described as the natural world is an agricultural landscape shaped by human intervention. Rather than approaching the rural as a stable or picturesque category, Morison considered it as a radical site of inquiry, marked by environmental damage, economic pressure and the search for alternative ways of living and working with land.
He visited farmers and land workers operating at the experimental edges of contemporary agriculture. Time was spent walking their land, discussing farming systems and encountering the crops, tools, animals and materials particular to each farm. These visits were documented through medium-format photography and writing, creating a record of both the agricultural landscape and the individuals working within it.
The residency explored the parallels between the lives of artists and farmers. Both can constitute an identity as much as an occupation. Both require forms of situated knowledge, improvisation and long-term commitment. Both are also caught within distorted economic systems, dependent upon external markets, funding structures and organisations that exert considerable control over how they work.
This research took place within the Sainsbury Centre’s curatorial season Why Do We Take Drugs? Morison extended the question into agriculture, considering the industry’s dependence upon pesticides, herbicides and other chemical interventions. He encountered a system in which farmers may be instructed to use products supplied by the same multinational companies that shape the wider pharmaceutical economy.
“It’s the pharmaceutical companies and agribusinesses. These same companies sell the herbicides and pesticides that farmers need, often under strict instructions from agronomists who work for these companies. It’s an addictive, broken system that’s very hard for farmers to escape. Some have managed to break free, but the parallels to pharmaceutical drug dependency are striking. It’s uncanny that the same companies are involved in both sectors.”
Ivan Morison, reflecting on Towards the Weird Heart of Things, 2024
Published by Sainsbury Centre
Alongside the farm visits, Morison held private and public life-drawing sessions with farmers. These introduced another kind of attention into the research. The working body became a source of knowledge, carrying the pressures, habits and physical intelligence of agricultural labour.
The sessions also complicated the relationship between observer and observed. Farmers who had been approached through their land and professional knowledge entered the life room as bodies to be looked at with care. Drawing created a space of concentration, vulnerability and duration. The resulting images did not function as conventional studies for figurative sculptures, but helped establish the bodily energy, posture and scale of the forms.
The sculptures developed from these encounters. They were not portraits of particular farmers in a representational sense. Instead, they translated the energy of the drawings, conversations and farm visits into agricultural matter. Straw, hemp, bean stalks and tomato plants from the farms were combined with hay and coppiced timber gathered from the Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park. Lime, clay and wool bound and marked their surfaces.
Each material retained a connection to the landscape and system from which it came. Crops cultivated for food, animal feed or fibre became sculptural flesh. Branches formed bones and supports. The forms accumulated through stacking, binding, compressing and coating rather than through the modelling of a predetermined figure.
Installed between the Sainsbury Centre, the University of East Anglia’s stepped residential ziggurats and the wider Sculpture Park, the works entered into conversation with two established languages of monumentality: the concrete architecture of Denys Lasdun and the industrial steel sculpture of artists such as Anthony Caro. Against these durable forms, Reapers I–III proposed a monument made from the seasonal harvest, structurally imposing but materially vulnerable.
The title moved across agricultural, technological and mythic meanings. A reaper is a person who harvests a crop. In gaming culture, Reapers are synthetic-organic entities produced through technological interference with living matter. The name also evokes the Grim Reaper and the long association between harvesting, mortality and the passage of time.
Morison described the sculptures as portraits of the farmers’ “punk spirit”:
“In gaming circles Reapers are a synthetic-organic alien race, connecting us to the fear we share of the mutant monsters sure to come from human techno meddling in plant biology.
“The literal meaning of ‘reapers’ is someone, usually a farmer, who harvests crops, apt for the material the works are made from, and as portraits of the punk spirit of the farmers I have met and drawn. These are portraits of revolutionary pioneers at the new frontier.
“And of course, ‘reapers’ also has a darker, religious and horror infused undertone, and these dark angels do loom somewhat in the landscape, reminding us of a future we hope to avoid.”
Ivan Morison, 2024
Published by Sainsbury Centre
Temporality was built into the sculptures. Exposed to a Norfolk winter, their plant matter dried, fermented, discoloured and fell away. Seeds could germinate within them. Birds and other animals could take material for nesting or shelter. Eventually, the works would collapse and compost.
This process challenged the assumed permanence of monumental sculpture. The Reapers were neither disposable temporary installations nor objects designed to be preserved unchanged. They were temporal structures, made to exist within processes of weathering, decomposition and return.
Reapers I–III marked the beginning of a significant new body of work for Morison. The residency brought the body into closer relation with landscape and matter, while the sculptures established a formal language that was monumental yet unstable, strange yet familiar. The work approached sculpture as a living condition, shaped not only by the artist but by farmers, crops, weather, microorganisms and time.
The sculptures developed from these encounters. They were not portraits of particular farmers in a representational sense. Instead, they translated the energy of the drawings, conversations and farm visits into agricultural matter. Straw, hemp, bean stalks and tomato plants from the farms were combined with hay and coppiced timber gathered from the Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park. Lime, clay and wool bound and marked their surfaces.
Each material retained a connection to the landscape and system from which it came. Crops cultivated for food, animal feed or fibre became sculptural flesh. Branches formed bones and supports. The forms accumulated through stacking, binding, compressing and coating rather than through the modelling of a predetermined figure.
Installed between the Sainsbury Centre, the University of East Anglia’s stepped residential ziggurats and the wider Sculpture Park, the works entered into conversation with two established languages of monumentality: the concrete architecture of Denys Lasdun and the industrial steel sculpture of artists such as Anthony Caro. Against these durable forms, Reapers I–III proposed a monument made from the seasonal harvest, structurally imposing but materially vulnerable.
The title moved across agricultural, technological and mythic meanings. A reaper is a person who harvests a crop. In gaming culture, Reapers are synthetic-organic entities produced through technological interference with living matter. The name also evokes the Grim Reaper and the long association between harvesting, mortality and the passage of time.
Morison described the sculptures as portraits of the farmers’ “punk spirit”:
“In gaming circles Reapers are a synthetic-organic alien race, connecting us to the fear we share of the mutant monsters sure to come from human techno meddling in plant biology.
“The literal meaning of ‘reapers’ is someone, usually a farmer, who harvests crops, apt for the material the works are made from, and as portraits of the punk spirit of the farmers I have met and drawn. These are portraits of revolutionary pioneers at the new frontier.
“And of course, ‘reapers’ also has a darker, religious and horror infused undertone, and these dark angels do loom somewhat in the landscape, reminding us of a future we hope to avoid.”
Ivan Morison, 2024
Published by Sainsbury Centre
Temporality was built into the sculptures. Exposed to a Norfolk winter, their plant matter dried, fermented, discoloured and fell away. Seeds could germinate within them. Birds and other animals could take material for nesting or shelter. Eventually, the works would collapse and compost.
This process challenged the assumed permanence of monumental sculpture. The Reapers were neither disposable temporary installations nor objects designed to be preserved unchanged. They were temporal structures, made to exist within processes of weathering, decomposition and return.
Reapers I–III marked the beginning of a significant new body of work for Morison. The residency brought the body into closer relation with landscape and matter, while the sculptures established a formal language that was monumental yet unstable, strange yet familiar. The work approached sculpture as a living condition, shaped not only by the artist but by farmers, crops, weather, microorganisms and time.
Photographers’ credits
Installation images_Ivan Morison
Installation images_Ivan Morison