Mary Morrison is based on the Isle of Harris where she grew up.  Her work is infused with the space, light and elemental qualities unique to the Atlantic archipelago, suggesting liminal spaces, edges and shifting tidal lines. She evokes a sense of place and natural forms through an alchemical use of oil-based materials. These often combine with graphic elements and annotation relating to mapping, measuring and music, creating an additional visual language and tension within the paintings. 

Mary’s work is informed by Geopoetics, a theory and practice developed by Scottish poet Kenneth White and is about expressing the earth through creative processes.
‘I am continually inspired by relationships between music, the written word and image. This exhibition of new work developed around an earlier painting ‘my music is the music of your stones’ which was created for the 40th Anniversary of An Lanntair in 2025 and takes its title from the poem ‘Lewis' by Iain Crichton Smith.  

The words of this poem echo ongoing themes in my work and the attachment to place and landscape. The initial impression in the central painting is of a ‘memory’ place – of weather and sea moving over rocks. A closer look reveals tiny pulses of ‘sound’ marking out space and time and the music of the poem’s title.  
Two works in the exhibition take their title from another poem – ‘Island Funeral’ by Hugh MacDiarmid. The line is ‘They are weather beaten people with eyes grown clear…From always watching far horizons’. It’s a beautiful line. 

Going beyond the surface is important to me, and the intention is for the work to reveal itself slowly.’

‘It follows me, that black island without ornament,
Which I am always questioning….
Sea, immortal waters, you are the harmony around us forever.
We exist in your music,
In your blizzard of white gulls….

Wherever I am, you are with me,
My music is the music of your stones, …
You are the book which I always study
In sunsets over the Minch,
You are my gaunt theme, my poem which burns in water.’

Extract from ‘Lewis’, by Iain Crichton Smith