A sculptural sanctuary emerges from the Cambridgeshire wetland
A new thatched artwork by Studio Morison provides minutes for reflection at Wicken Fen Nature Reserve
A thatched pavilion tinted gold by the sun sits on a wetland in Cambridgeshire, a sanctuary on a blustery late-winter day. Inside, visitors nestle into specific niches in the hand-milled wood structure. They raid the supple straw walls, looking up at the blue sky through an ideal oculus in the cone-shaped ceiling, like adorers at a small countryside Pantheon.
The experience is calm, meditative and spontaneous with the whiff of the spiritual, taking place, as it were, on the last day of the leap year. Mom …, designed by the Herefordshire-based practice Studio Morison, is the culmination of years of machinations. All of it began in 2017, when Arts Council England asked the general public to nominate little-known rural places across the east: Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Partner galleries, consisting of close-by Wysing Arts Centre, then commissioned ten art work motivated by those settings. The outcomes form a series called New Geographies, an innovative redrawing of the East England map. Heather and Ivan Morison set theirs in Wicken Fen, the National Trust’s earliest nature reserve..
Studio Morison, MOM …, 2020 Photography: Charles Emerson, Thanks To Wysing Arts Centre and National Trust for New Geographies.
Inspiration for the Morisons consisted of the healing memoir Nature Treatment by Richard Mabey, an author and naturalist who reconnected with the East Anglian landscape to relieve his own depression. Mom … is t
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