SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: MRS NOAH’S SONG
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/
CITY: Wales
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: SATA 369
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 8, 1961, in Birmingham, England; married (marriage ended); partner’s name Robin; children: Tom, Hannah.
EDUCATION:Attended Hereford College of Art and Bath Academy of Art.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author, illustrator, and painter. Exhibitions: Work exhibited at Cloisters Gallery, St. Davids, Pembrokshire, England; Tenby Museum, Tenby, Wales; The Sill, Northumberland National Park, with the solo show “The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices”; and elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
AVOCATIONS:Bird watching, baking, movies, walking.
AWARDS:Children’s Book Federation Award shortlist, 1997, for The Snow Whale; Tir Na Nóg Prize for Best English Book of the Year, Welsh Books Council, 1997, for Cities in the Sea, and 2005, for The Seal Children; Ravenheart Award shortlist, 2010, 2015; David Gemmell Award nomination, 2016; Kate Greenaway Medal shortlist, 2016, for Something about a Bear; Hay Festival Book of the Year, 2017, for The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane; Waterstones Book of the Year shortlist, 2019, for The House without Windows by Barbara Newhall Follett.
WRITINGS
Contributor of illustrations to periodicals, including the New Statesman, New Socialist, London Independent, and London Guardian. Author’s works have been translated into Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish.
SIDELIGHTS
British-born children’s author and illustrator Jackie Morris creates watercolor images that have appeared in dozens of books for young readers, including Ted Hughes’s How the Whale Became, and Other Stories and Sally Lloyd-Jones’s Little One, We Knew You’d Come. In addition to her work as an artist, Morris has also created numerous original picture books, including self-illustrated titles like The Seal Children and several books cleverly recasting a biblical scenario and featuring artwork by James Mayhew.
Born in Birmingham, England, in 1961, Morris moved to Evesham with her family when she was four. “Here I grew up and remember little of those times,” she declared in an autobiographical statement on her website. “I do know that from at least the age of six I wanted to be an artist. I watched my dad drawing a picture of a lapwing, making a bird appear on a piece of paper using only a pencil, and I thought it was some magic that made this happen. So there and then I decided to learn how to conjure birds from paper and colour.”
Despite warnings from elders that a career in the arts was not practical, Morris persisted and entered Hereford College of Art for a year before moving on to the Bath Academy of Art. After spending three years at Bath, the aspiring artist set off for London, portfolio in tow, hoping to find work as an illustrator.
One of the illustrating jobs she landed, creating pictures to appear on greeting cards, caught the attention of author Caroline Pitcher, who had just completed a children’s story and was searching for the right illustrator to create the artwork for it. Just days before the birth of her child, Morris received a call from publisher Bodley Head, offering her the opportunity to provide the pictures for Jo’s Storm, the first of several collaborations between Morris and Pitcher as well as the book that inspired Morris to create children’s books. Her first original picture-book story, Bears, Bears, and More Bears, was released in 1995, one year after Jo’s Storm.
Morris’s home in Wales plays an important role in several of her works, including her illustrations for Sian Lewis’s Cantre’r gwaelod. She transports readers to the ruined village of Maes y Mynyddd, Wales, in her mix of story and art for The Seal Children, her second original illustrated story. Grounded in Scottish myth, this tale focuses on a selkie—a sea creature that takes human form—who marries a fisherman and bears him two children before returning to her home deep in the sea. Left in the care of his human father, the selkie’s son grows to manhood and finds his way to his mother’s underwater home, returning to his father’s people only to give them the valuable pearls that enable them purchase passage on a trip bound for North America and a better life. Commenting on the “fine watercolors” Morris creates for The Seal Children, Margaret Bush added in School Library Journal that the author/illustrator’s “narrative is smoothly crafted … and the magical bond between humans and seals is ever intriguing.”
Set in the Himalayas, The Snow Leopard finds a small village guarded by a powerful Mergichan, a sacred cat that helps the village people find the best even in adversity. When the Mergichan begins to age it passes its powers to a young girl, then melts into the night sky to find a new home in the stars. “Lush watercolors of mountain landscapes fit well with the epic, mystical premise of the tale,” concluded Kathy Piehl in School Library Journal, and in Kirkus Reviews a writer cited the “mystical origins” of Morris’s tale, adding that “younger animal lovers and dreamy sorts will linger over both the art and the story” in The Snow Leopard. The “flowery text” in The Snow Leopard “follows the well-worn tracks of the language of myth,” wrote Bruno Navasky in the New York Times Book Review, and Morris’s “vivid watercolor illustrations … meld ink-brush abstraction and subtle detail into a gorgeous fantasy.”
Another exotic animal is the focus of The Ice Bear, and here Morris sets her story in a land where man does not hunt the polar bear for food. In this story, Raven is the catalyst as it first steals a bear cub from its mother and then helps a childless couple discover an abandoned human infant. After seven years, however, Raven returns and lures the child—now a young boy—into the snowy wilderness where he is rescued and adopted by the mother polar bear that lost her cub years before. “Visually stunning,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer, The Ice Bear treats readers to “a fanciful, wistful cuddle-up bedtime story,” and in School Library Journal, Kathleen Finn noted Morris’s use of “lyrical language” in a story that serves as “a thoughtful illumination of humankind’s need to live in harmony with nature.”
Morris has credited the six cats that share her home with inspiring I Am Cat, a picture book that combines images of ten big cats—a Siberian tiger, a lion, a lynx, and a jaguar among them—with the interior dialogue that might accompany the dreams of a drowsy tabby on a sunny windowsill. Noting that “Morris’ beautiful watercolors are clearly the major draw,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor added of I Am Cat that the book’s combination of “striking illustrations and lyrical descriptions will please fans of big cats.” Also impressed with the work, Mary Jean Smith wrote in School Library Journal that the “dramatic portraits” in I Am Cat, “rich in language and eye appeal, bring both the felines and their environments to life.”
Morris’s love of nature emerges in books like The Snow Leopard, but also in mythic form in The Ice Bear, The Wild Swans, The White Fox, and The Song of the Golden Hare. In the latter story, a little boy learns of his family’s long-held secret role in the transfer of the queenship from one generation of hares to the next. The author, said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “unfurls her tale in mythic, heightened language; her dreamy watercolors, of a piece with her poetic text, are amply accommodated.”
In both The Cat and the Fiddle: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, Morris reshapes original works, creating new illustrations for the forty rhymes in The Cat and the Fiddle and bringing a new twist to the oft-told Scandinavian story “The White Bear King” in East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Her “delicate, detailed watercolor-and-collage” images for the first book “will draw an older, more sophisticated audience that is ready to think about the meanings behind the nonsense,” predicted Hazel Rochman in a Booklist review, and a Kirkus Reviews critic asserted that the artist’s use of “muted but rich colors and fabulous floral patterns … lend both whimsy and grandeur to the rhymes” in The Cat and the Fiddle. Noting that Morris’s decision to meld her folk tale with “a haunting love story” in East of the Sun, West of the Moon, another critic in Kirkus Reviews asserted that this “leisurely, lyrical, romantic and realistic version is one to savor and to read aloud.”
Morris also compiled and illustrated The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, an anthology of classic English-language poetry. Praising The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems in the New York Times Book Review, Joanna Rudge Long asserted that the “bright watercolors and intriguing hints of story that Morris splashes across the pages makes [the anthology] … an attractive venue” for a new generation of readers.
A retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” by the Brothers Grimm, Morris’s The Secret of the Tattered Shoes features stylized artwork by Ehsan Abdollahi. Upon meeting a mysterious woman in the forest, a weary soldier learns of a mystery involving the king’s daughters, who greet each morning exhausted, their shoes in ruin. A great reward—a bride—awaits the man who can solve the riddle, but the king also promises death to those who fail him. Agreeing to the mission, the soldier’s pursuit of the truth leads him to an unexpected conclusion. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “fluid and haunting, retaining the grim themes and archaic social mores of traditional fairy tales as well as their strangely intriguing, mysterious, and fantastical qualities.”
Morris teamed with illustrator Mayhew on Mrs. Noah’s Pockets and its sequel, Mrs. Noah’s Garden. In the former title, a reimagining of the Biblical epic, Noah decides that the flood offers the perfect opportunity to rid the world of its “troublesome” animals. As he builds the ark, his more sympathetic wife gets to work with her sewing machine, constructing a very special coat with incredibly deep pockets. “Mayhew tracks the drama of the flood in boldly colored, multi-textured collages, and Morris builds slow, beguiling suspense,” a Publishers Weekly critic explained. “With themes relevant to today’s international struggles over exclusion, scarcity, and prejudice,” a contributor stated in Kirkus Reviews, “this reinvention is a beautiful and necessary parable for our time.”
An original tale by Morris, Mrs. Noah’s Garden “asserts a case for active stewardship between people and their environment,” Robbin E. Friedman commented in School Library Journal. With the floodwaters receded and the ark safely on dry land, Mrs. Noah prepares the earth to undergo a magical transformation. “The text is thick with lush, lovely description and symbolic imagery of life and regeneration,” observed a Kirkus Reviews writer. In the words of London Guardian critic Imogen Russell Williams, “Mayhew’s glorious collaged artwork combines with Morris’s restrained text to show how bare rock and sparse vegetation can become a flourishing garden, nurturing new life of all kinds.”
[open new]The environmental matriarch of Morris’s freshened myth returns in Mrs. Noah’s Song. Singing throughout her daytime tasks of sewing and gardening, Mrs. Noah is asked by her children why she does so. After wistfully remembering her grandmother and mother, Mrs. Noah implores the children to listen to the garden around them. As the sounds of chirping birds, buzzing bees, and a soft breeze reach their ears, the children are overcome with a feeling of tranquility. But Mrs. Noah adds that the garden’s sunrise song is best, so Mr. Noah sews a hammock in which they can sleep outdoors and greet the dawn. A Kirkus Reviews writer hailed the book’s depiction of post-flood life as “enchanted and interwoven with nature.” With the “imagery-rich text” and mixed-media illustrations creating a “harmonious composition that touches on themes of oral storytelling, generational art, and rebirth,” the reviewer lauded Mrs. Noah’s Song as “dulcet elegance.”[suspend new]
Apart from her original picture books, Morris spends much of her time as an illustrator creating art for stories by others. Together with Mary Hoffman, she has illuminated the religious-themed books Parables: Stories Jesus Told, Miracles: Wonders Jesus Worked, and Animals of the Bible, each which features Hoffman’s retelling of a biblical story in a colloquial tone that speaks directly to children. Morris’s realistic watercolor artwork, done in warm, dusty earth tones, “depicts earnest-faced people of the ancient Holy Land in a vivid landscape,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor in a review of Parables, helping to make the volume an “intimate, thought-provoking picture book.” School Library Journal reviewer Patricia Pearl Dole also commented upon the “strong, melancholy, expressive faces” of Morris’s characters, calling the same volume “particularly reader-friendly and attractive.”
Morris’s paintings for Animals of the Bible were also widely praised. This book collects several stories from the Old Testament that feature animals, including “Adam Naming the Animals,” “Noah’s Ark,” “Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” and “Jonah and the Whale.” Morris’s watercolors are “lush [and] detailed,” as Susan Oliver wrote in School Library Journal, and the artist “depict[s] all animals, even insects, with grace, dignity, and beauty.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer echoed this theme, writing that the artist “truly excels in her depictions of birds, beasts, and sea creatures—they are realistic yet endowed with unmistakable grandeur.”
In Mariana and the Merchild: A Folk Tale from Chile, Morris’s art accompanies Pitcher’s retelling of a traditional South American tale. In Booklist, Gillian Engberg wrote that Morris’s illustrations for Mariana and the Merchild “bring characters to life in luminous detail that will draw young readers back into the tale.” Similarly, School Library Journal contributor Tali Balas commented that the illustrator’s “dramatic paintings, done in reds, blues, and greens, make the story come alive” and “the realistic portrayal of the people adds to the tale’s magic.”
A bestseller in Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words delivers “a sumptuous, nostalgic ode to a disappearing landscape,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. In response to a thinning of the Oxford Junior English Dictionary, which eliminated terms such as heron, nectar, and willow, Macfarlane produced a volume of acrostic poems, accompanied by Morris’s illustrations, that reclaim the “lost words.” In the Washington Post Book World, Meara Sharma observed that “Morris’ watercolor scenes have a restrained lushness, as though muted by a light but pervasive fog. Her depictions of a world without—a single rumpled heron feather floating in empty space; the parched, ashen remains of a fern—are hauntingly beautiful.”
[resume new]Morris also illustrated Macfarlane’s follow-up title The Lost Spells. This time, author and illustrator seek to counter the disappearance of nature from people’s everyday lives with a book of poetic spells that conjure and evoke familiar creatures. Daisies, gorse, snow hare, woodpecker, and red fox are among the flora and fauna that get described and celebrated in mesmerizing verse. The western jackdaw gets a rap-like incantation, while the swallow and goldfinch have mournful ballads. A Publishers Weekly reviewer appreciated how Morris’s “fluid” illustrations capture the “elegant tilt of a fox’s snout, birds’ calligraphic flight patterns, and the eyelike whorls of silver birch bark,” helping make The Lost Spells an “artful” nature guide.[close new]
“Something of what I hope to achieve,” Morris told L.M. Browning in the Wayfarer, “is to bring to children an awareness and a love of the wild world, the world outside the human, the world that for me is so important. I would like to help to foster a respect for the natural world in which we live that has been lacking in Western culture for far too long.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 1998, Susan Dove Lempke, review of The Fourth Wise Man, p. 345; January 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of The Time of the Lion, p. 890; March 1, 2000, Gillian Engberg, review of Mariana and the Merchild: A Folk Tale from Chile, p. 1246; October 1, 2000, Shelley Townsend-Hudson, review of Parables: Stories Jesus Told, p. 356; December 1, 2000, Gillian Engberg, review of How the Whale Became, and Other Stories, p. 709; October 1, 2001, Ilene Cooper, review of Parables, p. 333, Ilene Cooper, review of Miracles: Wonders Jesus Worked, p. 337; January 1, 2003, Ilene Cooper, review of Animals of the Bible, pp. 897-898; December 15, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of The Snow Leopard, p. 52; January 1, 2012, Hazel Rochman, review of The Cat and the Fiddle: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, p. 92; November 1, 2013, Carolyn Phelan, review of Little Evie in the Wild Wood, p. 85; October 15, 2018, Donna Seaman, review of The Lost Words, p. 20.
Books for Keeps, March, 1996, review of Bears, Bears, and More Bears, p. 6.
Children’s Bookwatch, September, 2008, review of Singing to the Sun.
Guardian (London, England), December 23, 2017, Imogen Russell Williams, review of Mrs. Noah’s Pockets; May 30, 2020, Imogen Russell Williams, review of Mrs. Noah’s Garden.
Horn Book, November-December, 2011, Lauren Kim, review of The Greatest Gift: The Story of the Other Wise Man, p. 72.
Junior Bookshelf, August, 1995, review of Bears, Bears, and More Bears, p. 129.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2003, review of Animals of the Bible, p. 307; August 1, 2004, review of Lord of the Forest, p. 748; October 1, 2006, review of The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, p. 1020; November 1, 2006, review of Little One, We Knew You’d Come, p. 1131; October 15, 2007, review of The Snow Leopard; November 1, 2009, review of Tell Me a Dragon; September 1, 2011, review of The Greatest Gift; June 1, 2011, review of The Ice Bear; November 15, 2011, review of The Cat and the Fiddle; March 1, 2013, review of East of the Sun, West of the Moon; April 15, 2013, review of I Am Cat; February 15, 2014, review of The Song of the Golden Hare; November 15, 2014, review of Something about a Bear; November 1, 2016, review of One Cheetah, One Cherry: A Book of Beautiful Numbers; March 1, 2018, review of Mrs. Noah’s Pockets; October 1, 2018, review of The Lost Words; August 1, 2020, review of Mrs. Noah’s Garden; October 1, 2020, review of The Secret of the Tattered Shoes; September 1, 2022, review of Mrs. Noah’s Song.
New Statesman, December 13, 2013, “Box of Delights: Amanda Craig Picks the Year’s Best Children’s Books,” p. 57.
New York Times Book Review, May 13, 2007, Joanna Rudge Long, review of The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, p. 16; January 13, 2009, Bruno Navasky, review of The Snow Leopard, p. 20.
Plays, December, 1996, review of The Snow Whale, p. 64.
Publishers Weekly, April 8, 1996, review of Out of the Ark: Stories from the World’s Religions, p. 63; August 10, 1998, review of The Time of the Lion, p. 387; September 28, 1998, Elizabeth Devereaux, “’Tis the Season to Be Reading,” p. 48; March 13, 2000, review of Mariana and the Merchild, p. 83; July 24, 2000, review of Parables, p. 91; September 25, 2000, “Many Happy Returns,” p. 120; July 30, 2001, review of Miracles, p. 82; March 31. 2003, review of Animals of the Bible, p. 63; September 25, 2006, review of Little One, We Knew You’d Come, p. 70; October 24, 2011, “Story Hour,” p. 51; November 27, 2018, reviews of Mrs. Noah’s Pockets, p. 26, and The Lost Words, p. 98; September 28, 2020, review of The Lost Spells, p. 66; October 12, 2020, review of The Secret of the Tattered Shoes, p. 72; December 2, 2020, review of The Lost Spells, p. 94.
School Librarian, winter, 2019, Mary Medlicott, review of The House without Windows, p. 228.
School Library Journal, April, 1996, Kathy Piehl, review of Out of the Ark, p. 145; September, 1998, Denise E. Agosto, review of Grandmother’s Song, pp. 182-183; December, 1998, Martha Topol, review of The Time of the Lion, p. 88; May, 2000, Tali Balas, review of Mariana and the Merchild, p. 163; November, 2000, Patricia Pearl Dole, review of Parables, p. 142; April, 2003, Susan Oliver, review of Animals of the Bible, p. 150; July, 2004, Margaret Bush, review of The Seal Children, p. 83; October, 2006, Eva Mitnick, review of Little One, We Knew You’d Come, p. 97; January, 2007, Marilyn Taniguchi, review of The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems, p. 153; May, 2008, Kathy Piehl, review of The Snow Leopard, p. 104; May, 2011, Kathleen Finn, review of The Ice Bear, p. 84; January, 2012, Rita Meade, review of The Cat and the Fiddle, p. 96; May, 2013, Mary Jean Smith, review of I Am Cat, p. 83; June, 2020, Robbin E. Friedman, review of Mrs. Noah’s Garden, p. 52; December, 2020, Jessica Caron, review of The Secret of the Tattered Shoes, p. 82; December, 2020, Elizabeth Speer, review of The Lost Spells, p. 113.
Sunday Times (London, England), October 6, 2019, Nicolette Jones, review of The Secret of the Tattered Shoes.
Washington Post Book World, December 8, 2017, Meara Sharma, review of The Lost Words.
ONLINE
CBC website, https://www.cbc.ca/ (October 26, 2020), “The Lost Spells Conjures Up the Magic of Everyday Nature.”
Folk Horror Revival, https://folkhorrorrevival.com/ (March 11, 2020), John Pilgrim, “Interview with Jackie Morris.”
iNews, https://inews.co.uk/ (August 5, 2022), Rebecca Armstrong, “Jackie Morris: The Grief of Two Deaths in One Devastating Week Stopped Me from Painting.”
Jackie Morris website, https://www.jackiemorris.co.uk (March 23, 2023).
Our Book Reviews Online, http://ourbookreviewsonline.blogspot.com/ (August 30, 2010), review of The Ice Bear.
Public Books website, https://www.publicbooks.org/ (September 3, 2018), Daegan Miller, “‘Protest Can Be Beautiful’: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane.”
The Sill website, https://www.thesill.org.uk/ (August 12, 2022), Rebecca Connolly, “An Interview with Jackie Morris.”
Toast, https://www.toa.st/magazine/arts-culture.htm/ (February 12, 2018), author interview.
Waking Brain Cells, http://wakingbraincells.com/ (October 28, 2011), review of The Ice Bear.
Wayfarer, http://thewayfarer.homeboundpublications.com/ (March 20, 2017), L.M. Browning, “Reimagining the Possible: Illustrator Jackie Morris.”
White Horse Gallery website, https://whitehorsegallery.co.uk/ (March 23, 2023), author profile.
Jackie Morris
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Jackie Morris
Born 1961 (age 61–62)
Birmingham, England, UK
Occupation Illustrator, writer
Nationality British
Alma mater Bath Academy of Art
Genre Children's
Jackie Morris (born 1961) is a British writer and illustrator. She was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2016 and won it in 2019[1] for her illustration of The Lost Words, voted the most beautiful book of 2016 by UK booksellers.[2] She is a recipient of the Tir na n-Og Award for children's book Seal Children.
Contents
1 Life
2 Career
3 Works
4 Awards and recognitions
5 References
6 External links
Life
Morris was born in Birmingham in 1961. Her family moved to Evesham when she was four. As a child she was told that she couldn't be an artist, but despite this she learned to paint. Morris went to High school at Prince Henry's High School in Evesham and afterward the Bath Academy of Art.[3][4]
On leaving college she found work in editorial, illustrating magazines like Radio Times, New Statesman, New Society and Country Living. She worked for years illustrating books and in 2016, she was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for Something About a Bear. The book includes her water colours of different types of bear.
She lives in a small house by the sea in Wales, painting and writing.
Career
The Lost Words is a book of "spells" by Robert Macfarlane with illustrations by Morris. The book has clues to words like acorn, blackberry and conker. The book was said[by whom?] to be inspired by 21st-century editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in which some words like kingfisher associated with nature were omitted in order to include technical terms like attachment, broadband and chatroom.[5][6] In 2017, Laurence Rose organised a protest letter to the dictionary and it was signed by Margaret Atwood, Sara Maitland, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Macfarlane, and Morris. Much debate ensued but the creative outcome was an idea for joint work by McFarlane and Morris.[5] This book was voted the most beautiful book by UK booksellers in 2016.[2]
An exhibition of The Lost Words was held at Compton Verney in 2017, featuring immersive floor to ceiling graphics of the poems and illustrations in the book.[7] The exhibition subsequently toured Britain, hosted by the Foundling Museum in London, Inverleith House in Edinburgh, Royal Albert Museum in Exeter,[8] and the North York Moors National Park’s art gallery in Danby.[9]
A Welsh language version of The Lost Words 'Geiriau Diflanedig' was published by Graffeg in 2019[10] with author Mererid Hopwood adapting Macfarlane's acrostic spell-poems within Morris' illustrations.
An audiobook of The Lost Words has been narrated by Guy Garvey, Edith Bowman, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Cerys Matthews,[11] with ambient sound recordings Chris Watson.[12]
Works
As author and illustrator
Cities in the Sea (1996) with Sian Lewis[13]
The Seal Children (2004)[13]
Can You See a Little Bear (2005) with James Mayhew
Compilation and illustration of The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems (2006)
The Snow Leopard (2007)
Tell Me a Dragon (2009)
The Ice Bear (2010)
The Cat and the Fiddle: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (2011)
Queen of the Sky (2011)
I am Cat (2012)
Song of the Golden Hare (2013)
East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2013)
Words of Little Evie in the Wild Wood (2013) illustrated by Catherine Hyde
Something About a Bear (2014)[14]
The Wild Swans (2015)
Cat Walk (2015)
The Quiet Music of Gently Falling Snow (2016)
The While Fox (2016)
The Lost Words (2017) with Robert Macfarlane[5]
Words of Mrs Noah's Pockets (2018) illustrated by James Mayhew
The Secret of the Tattered Shoes (2019) with Ehsan Abdollahi
The Lost Spells (2020) with Robert Macfarlane[5]
As illustrator
The Snow Whale (1996) by Caroline Pitcher
Out of the Ark: Stories from the World's Religions (1996) by Anita Ganeri
The Time of the Lion (1998) by Caroline Pitcher
The Fourth Wise Man (1998) by Susan Summers
Stories from the Stars: Greek Myths of the Zodiac (1998) by Juliet Sharman-Burke
Lord of the Dance (1998) by Sydney Carter
Grandmother's Song (2000) by Barbara Soros
New edition of How the Whale Became (1963) by Ted Hughes (2000)
Marianna and the Merchild (2000) by Caroline Pitcher
Parables: Stories Jesus Told (2000) by Mary Hoffman
Animals of the Bible (2003) by Mary Hoffman
Lord of the Forest (2004) by Caroline Pitcher
Little One, We Knew You'd Come (2006) by Sally Lloyd-Jones
Singing to the Sun (2008) by Vivian French
Starlight Sailor (2013) by James Mayhew
Walking on Water: Miracles Jesus Worked (2017) by Mary Hoffman
Lost and Found: Parables Jesus Told (2017) by Mary Hoffman
Notable artwork
Cover art for many books by Robin Hobb
Three Hares[15] print
Judy Dyble's album, Talking with Strangers, featured her art for its second pressing
Awards and recognitions
Awards
1997 Tir na n-O Award for Cities in the Sea[13]
2005 Tir na n-O Award for The Seal Children[13]
2017 Books Are My Bag Readers' Award for The Lost Words[2]
2019 Kate Greenaway Medal for The Lost Words[1]
Shortlisted
2016 Kate Greenaway Medal for Something About a Bear[14]
Biography
I was born in Birmingham and lived there until at the age of four my parents moved away to Evesham.
Here I grew up and remember little of those times. I do know that from at least the age of six I wanted to be an artist. I watched my dad drawing a picture of a lapwing, making a bird appear on a piece of paper using only a pencil, and I thought it was some magic that made this happen. So there and then I decided to learn how to conjure birds from paper and colour.
I went to school in Evesham to Prince Henry’s High School and I remember walking to school past shop fronts above which elegant buildings grew. I used to get told off at school for drawing and dreaming. Now I get paid to do both.
I remember walking in the park by the river, bank voles and weeping willows and bright flashes of kingfishers. I loved the ferry at Hampton where the ferryman pulled you across the river to a land of fields and blackberries, where my dad would walk with me and show me how to find birds’ nests and tales of when he was a boy.
After school I went to college, first in Hereford, then to Exeter where they told me that I would never make it as an illustrator and from there I escaped to Bath Academy, set in a beautiful stately home in Corsham. Here I developed a love for peacocks. These bright birds with their ridiculous tails would fly into our gardens.
After college I moved briefly to London, just off Balham High Road. I thought you had to live in London because that is where most of the publishing houses are. (It didn’t take me long to realize that I was not born to live in a city) It was here that my real education began as I took my portfolio around magazine publishers and book publishers. I worked in magazines and books for seven years, for The New Statesman, New Socialist, Independent, Guardian and Radio Times. I designed cards and calendars for Greenpeace and Amnesty International and fell into children’s books by accident.
I moved to Wales just before starting my first children’s book, Jo’s Storm, by Caroline Pitcher and have lived in the same place ever since, a small cottage held together by spider’s webs. Cats come and go. At the moment I share the house with Tom and Hannah, my son and daughter, Floss and Bella, two odd dogs, and Maurice, Pixie, Elmo, Martha and Max, cats of various colour but mostly ginger.
Things I like: Blue, cats, the smell of honeysuckle, rose petals, birds, words, fires, good books, crayons and paint, the smell of a new book, polar bears, moonlight and moonshadows, stars, sunrise, sunset, dew on the grass, poetry, red, random acts of kindness, long gold grass of late summer, the sound of the wind in the trees, the brush of a butterfly’s wings, the fragility of bone, wasp’s nests, washing on a line blowing in the wind on a sunny winter’s day, the patterns the sea draws on a beach each day and night.
Music I like: Bjork, Stephen Fearing, Sufjan Stevens, Paulo Nutini, Nina Simone, Seth Lakeman, Cara Dillon, Kate Rusby, Karine Polwart, Coco Rosie, The Only Ones, Josh Ritter, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Sidsel Endresen, Ludovico Einaudi, Nick Drake, Yo Yo Ma, Christy Moore, Leon Rosselson, The Waterboys – especially The Whole of the Moon.
Books I like: The Book Thief, anything by Robin Hobb, Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, The Arrivals by Shaun Tan, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Ropemaker, The Stolen Child and many more.
Films I like: Mirrormask, Stardust, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, Pirates of the Caribbean, In the Mood for Love, Tears of the Weeping Camel, House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Science of Sleep, Cave of the Yellow Dog, Atonement, Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid.
Wishes and Desires: I would like a grandfather clock that chimes the hour and has a big key to wind it up. It would sit in my studio and when I have painted for six hours I would get up to make tea and wind back time, because what I need more than anything is more hours in the day. I would like infinite patience and a quiet mind. I would like a tidy house, clean and smelling of roses or frankincense, instead of a house that looks as if it inhabited by trolls and smelling of wet dogs. I would like my garden to be consumed by the hillside, to grow heather and foxgloves and all things wild, where snakes and spiders live with butterflies and birds.
Things I like to do: Walk, fly kites, watch birds fly, lie back on a high rock and watch clouds form and disperse, lie back in a wood and watch leaves fall, read, watch a good film under a blanket of cats, making things appear on paper using only coloured water, walking by shallow rivers where water tumbles over clear stone beds.
Artists I like: Angela Barrett, Brian Wildsmith, Maurice Sendak, James Mayhew, Marc Chagall, Sophie Rider, Chris Riddell ( who can draw a straight line and make it more beautiful than any other), Medieval illuminated manuscripts and the anonymity of the artists who made them, Shaun Tan, Peter Sis, Kay Nielsen, Catherine Hyde.
Poems I love: The Stolen Child by Yeats, Amulet by Ted Hughes, Lone Dog, Until I Saw the Sea, He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven by Yeats, the madness of nursery rhymes.
Books I like: Tarka the Otter, anything by Robin Hobb, 100 years of Solitude, House of the Spirits,Where the Wild Things Are, The Mousehole Cat, The Patchwork Cat, Hanta Yo, Last Night in Twisted River,
Films I like: Serenity, The English Patient, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Tears of the Weeping Camel, Betty Blue, Birdy, Blade Runner, The Secret of Roan Innish, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Open Range, Robin Hood-Prince of Thieves, Waterworld, Star Trek ( the new one),The Unbearable Lightness of being, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Jackie Morris is an artist and writer. She is well known for her stunning watercolour artworks and loves to walk near her home by the sea, watching and dreaming of bears and whales.
She was born in 1961 in Birmingham and lived there until at the age of four when her family moved to Evesham, inspired to draw from a very early age by her father who used to sketch and take her on outings in nature.
“I remember walking in the park by the river, bank voles and weeping willows and bright flashes of kingfishers. I loved the ferry at Hampton where the ferryman pulled you across the river to a land of fields and blackberries, where my dad would walk with me and show me how to find birds’ nests and tales of when he was a boy.”
She went to school at Prince Henry’s High School, where she was discouraged from drawing and dreaming. Later she went to college, first in Hereford, then to Exeter, where they told her that she would never make it as an illustrator.
Undaunted she escaped to Bath Academy, set in a beautiful stately home in Corsham. The Academy with its peacocks and lawns was a much better creative environment.
After graduation she found work in London as an illustrator for magazine and book publishers.
Over a seven year period she worked for The New Statesman, New Socialist, Independent, Guardian and Radio Times. She also designed cards and calendars for Greenpeace and Amnesty International and fell into children’s books by accident.
Jackie moved to Wales just before starting her first children’s book, Jo’s Storm, by Caroline Pitcher. She has illustrated many books over the years and has successfully authored a growing number herself. She says she enjoys the company of animals to people but can be quite sociable on occasion.
She still lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales and works from her home studio.
“I would like a grandfather clock that chimes the hour and has a big key to wind it up. It would sit in my studio and when I have painted for six hours I would get up to make tea and wind back time, because what I need more than anything is more hours in the day.”
The Lost Spells conjures up the magic of everyday nature
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New poetry and picture book is a followup to bestseller The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
CBC Radio · Posted: Oct 26, 2020 5:25 PM ET | Last Updated: October 26, 2020
Jackie Morris illustrated this own for the book The Lost Spells, created in collaboration with writer Robert Macfarlane. (House of Anansi Press)
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This article was originally published on Oct. 26, 2020.
Read Story Transcript
The Lost Spells is best read aloud, says author Robert Macfarlane.
The picture book features 21 poems or "spells" to conjure up the incredible magic of everyday plants and animals, each illustrated by artist Jackie Morris.
"These are spells in the old sense that spells have an oral magic to them. They're almost always written to be uttered. And I think that's true of a lot of poetry, and it's certainly true of the language that I try to use here," Macfarlane told As It Happens host Carol Off.
"I want it to jump around in the mouth like an otter tumbles in a stream."
A snippet of Macfarlane's poem about the jackdaw, illustrated by Morris. (House of Anansi Press)
The Lost Spells — aimed at children aged "one to 100" — is the much anticipated follow-up to Morris and Macfarlane's bestseller The Lost Words, an illustrated book about the nature-related words that were cut from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, starting with "acorn" and ending with "wren."
For this book, the British collaborators chose subjects that were closer to their hearts, and closer to their homes.
"This one is partly creatures and plants that Jackie and I love and know," Marfarlane said. "But also, they're everyday."
There's a spell for the red fox, for example, and one for the woodpecker, and another for daisies — "and it names them and seeks to conjure them in image and word," Macfarlane said.
Morris and Macfarlane created The Lost Spells, a picture book to conjure the magic of everyday plants and animals. (House of Anansi Press)
There's a propulsive and almost rap-like tongue twister about the western jackdaw, a European crow, which British schoolchildren have been memorizing and performing. There are wistful ballads about the swallow and the goldfinch, respectively inspired by Macfarlane's sleeping child and dying grandmother.
"These aren't the snow leopards. These are not the wild parakeets. But they're the nature we live with," Macfarlane said.
Also unlike The Lost Words — which was a massive, glossy hardcover — The Lost Spells is a little more compact. The idea, says Macfarlane, is for people to take it outdoors with them and read it as they connect with the natural world — an experience many are turning to during the pandemic.
"I hope The Lost Spells will be something people can carry with them in these difficult times, as a place for the mind to rest," Morris told the Guardian. "I hope it will help children to re-enchant their parents with the wild wonder and beauty of the world around them."
As a species, we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name.
- Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Spells author
Macfarlane's poems connect the magic of the natural world to deeply personal and highly human observations. He wrote the words for Swallow while watching his young child sleeping.
"There's the moment I remember so clearly when you have a very young child by your side, and [they're] the most fragile and beautiful thing you've ever seen. And they breathe out and then they breathe in. And then there's a pause, and in that split second, you think they might never breathe out again. And then they do," he said.
"And I suddenly thought that that split second is an abyss. It's a chasm into which you topple. And down there, there's no light. There's no growth. There's nothing. It's this tiny, tiny death that is reversed and you step out of it."
While reading Swallow aloud, the reader finds themselves transported to this dark, lifeless chasm, until they are rescued by a swallow.
"In this spell, which is really a parent's spell, a swallow swoops down into the chasm and lifts the speaker out and sows shut the chasm. And then everything begins again. Plants grow. Stars shine. The planet turns. And the child breathes out."
In The Lost Spells, a swallow rescues the reader from the dark abyss between a sleeping child's breaths. (House of Anansi Press)
It's a spell that is intentionally very dark, yet also hopeful — which is how Macfarlane said he feels about the state of the natural world and the work people are doing to preserve and restore it.
"We see this all of these extraordinary restoration programs," he said. "Give nature a chance, and it will flow back. It will surge back."
The Lost Words book gives new life to nature terms cut from Oxford Junior Dictionary
B.C. students send letters to Oxford telling dictionary to bring back lost nature words
It's something that takes hard work, he said. And, of course, magic.
"As a species, we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name," he said. "And so we circle back to the idea that there is a profound goodness in knowing and naming with love and with care and with honour the creatures and the plants that we share the world with, and that this is the acorn that grows change."
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Katie Geleff.
Jackie Morris: The grief of two deaths in one devastating week stopped me from painting
Painter and poet Jackie Morris experienced the death of her father and brother-in-law just days apart, as the Covid pandemic was beginning. She started to put the pieces back together with her new book of poetry
Artist Jackie Morris, left, and one of the poems she wrote while grieving the death of her father, and her partner’s brother
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By Rebecca Armstrong
August 5, 2022 7:00 am(Updated 2:44 pm)
At the start of the pandemic, artist and writer Jackie Morris, like so many people, felt utterly lost. “I was in the strangest of places,” she says. “I’d spent three months away from home because my dad was in hospital. I was looking after my mum, who can’t drive, and we could tell that dad was dying. My daughter was away at sea and then there was this unfolding pandemic.”
The path that her father’s doctors were suggesting for his care seemed to be at odds with his wishes. “He told me ‘I’ve had a good life. And I want to go now, I don’t want to live like this’,” she says, eyes wet with tears. After a long illness, he was nearing the end of his journey.
“We couldn’t access palliative care because the doctors were saying, ‘Oh no, he’s got ages yet’. Dad had quite a profound faith, and he had had enough of life and wanted to die. There was such a disconnect between asking for care so that he could be at home. We met a stone wall of being told that he was fine. Within a week of coming out of hospital, Dad died.”
Writer and artist Jackie Morris, as a child, with her family Image taken from website, with permission given to Rebecca Armstrong via Instagram https://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/biography/
Jackie Morris as a child with her sister, mother and father (Photo: Supplied)
Morris, whose magical artworks for The Lost Words, a best-selling book of poems about nature created with Robert Macfarlane, won her the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for children’s book illustration, found herself without her usual coping mechanism. “My life has been painting but after he died, I couldn’t paint.” Another blow was to come.
The same week her father died, her partner’s brother, Jeremy, died by suicide. “We were utterly raw, riddled with all kinds of guilt. The two things coming together in the same week were just devastating.
“We had two funerals that weren’t celebrations of life. One of Jeremy’s children was in Canada and one was in Sweden. They couldn’t come to his funeral. Everybody was melting away. There wasn’t an official limit on how many people you could have yet [with the pandemic], but people have begun to realise it wasn’t a good idea to gather. At my father’s funeral, my sister read, and we couldn’t hug each other. It was dreadful.”
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When the first lockdown came it offered an unexpected port in a storm of private sadness and global fear. “It was like the lockdown sheltered me because I was supposed to be doing events. I couldn’t have done it, gone on stage. It was hard to breathe, let alone speak.”
Instead, comfort for Morris came from “walking up the hill behind my house and trying to find some words or some peace of mind”. It was these words that eventually evolved into a beautiful and strange new book of poems and images, called Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone. Each page is an individual piece of art made by Morris, that forms a sequence to be looked at and read.
“The way that I made sense of things, or tried to, was through writing,” she explains. “It was like the spaces in between breaths, these small pieces of writing.”
Many of the poems are typed on a typewriter that had belonged to her father, on shimmering sheets of gold leaf – “I had lots of gold leaf lying around after The Lost Words”, Morris tells me – before being photographed in the light of her Pembrokeshire garden.
“I photographed it one morning, and it took four hours. I had to wait for the weather to be right because it had to be in natural light. Every piece of writing came from outside.” She admits, with a grin, the extent of her DIY approach. “I didn’t tell the publisher that I was also holding the camera and not doing it with a tripod.”
Page from Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone by Jackie Morris Credit: Jackie Morris Provided by rina@unbound.co.uk
A page from Morris’s book Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone (Photo: Jackie Morris)
The sunlit poems are a window into a private grief. In one, she laments how bereavement has paralysed her.
I can paint, write,
Through almost any circumstance,
Anywhere, but, for now,
I cannot find the words I need.
Elusive, they hide, brain
Fractured, head, heart, out of line.
Another reads like directions for what to do when grieving:
Things to do:
Take a stone for a walk.
Takes leaves of gold up a hill,
release into the wild.
Takes leaves of gold to stream,
bring home, dry.
Find the silence in which
to catch the shape of words.
Breathe, and in between, peace.
Yet, she says that the book is not all about grief. “A lot of it is about life and me trying to learn about how everything changes. The shape of rocks. The movement of water, of clouds across a landscape”.
There are poems typed on leaves, on bark and on feathers. Poems that celebrate being alive, existing in a world where wrens and curlews sing and soar, that were written in a time of vulnerability. “It’s more public than any book that I’ve ever done – I was quite scared of putting it out there because it feels like standing naked in a bookshop,” she says.
Page from Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone by Jackie Morris Credit: Jackie Morris Provided by rina@unbound.co.uk
In the book there are poems typed on feathers (Photo: Jackie Morris)
I wonder: what was the most difficult thing to type on? Silver birch bark? Not at all – “Birch bark is the easiest, it’s like paper.” Feathers were trickier. “They’re really hard. Seabirds’ feathers were easier because they’re very oily. But mostly I’ve been typing on swan feathers. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t.” Spare a thought for the typewriter repairman who looked over her machine. “He asked ‘what have you been doing? It’s absolutely filthy!”
Navigating the death of a loved one has of course been the subject for countless writers, from John Donne and CS Lewis, to Joan Didion and more recently Max Porter and Clover Stroud. These explorations of an individual’s own grief can offer others comfort.
Did Morris find solace in reading? Not at first. “Concentration was difficult. But now I’m more interested in understanding what it’s like for other people. I just picked up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief and it is glorious. Her anger at the loss of her father was very different to my grief. I felt relief, because my dad had said to us ‘I’ve had a good life. And I want to go now, I know there’s a better thing waiting’.”
In the days after his death, Morris wrote in her journal that “I am wearing my father’s watch. The face of it is deep blue. It’s there to both remind me of him and also that time is always too precious to waste.” It’s something that is increasingly on her mind, she says, as she moves forward. “I think a lot of my work now is trying to understand time. I’m 61, I want to make the most of what time I have left. Yeah. With luck, it’ll be about 30 years. But it might not be, so I’m trying to learn what now is.”
‘Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone’ by Jackie Morris (Unbound, £20) is out now
Interview with Jackie Morris
MARCH 11, 2020
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Jackie Morris is a British writer and illustrator whose work is informed by a deep love of the natural world. Her books have been published in fourteen languages and The Lost Words, which she illustrated was voted the most beautiful book of 2016 by UK booksellers. She lives in Pembrokeshire by the sea and is fascinated by bears and myths of transformation. Folk Horror Revival’s John Pilgrim was pleased to catch up with Jackie last year to make the following enquiries about her world.
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FHR: Let me firstly provide a bit of context for those Folk Horror Revivalists who may not be familiar with The Lost Worlds by quoting from the cover jacket of the book.
“All over the country, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. These are the words of the natural world — Dandelion, Otter, Bramble and Acorn, all gone. The rich landscape of wild imagination and wild play is rapidly fading from our children’s minds. The Lost Words stands against the disappearance of wild childhood. It is a joyful celebration of nature words and the natural world they invoke. With acrostic spell-poems by award-winning writer Robert Macfarlane and hand-painted illustration by Jackie Morris, this enchanting book captures the irreplaceable magic of language and nature for all ages.”
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FHR: The Lost Words has enchanted many people in the deepest sense of the word. Can you share some stories about the effect which it has had on people. How has their understanding and experience of the natural world changed?
JM: Since the launch of The Lost Words at Foyles in 2017 it has taken on a life of its own. Robert and I are both astonished and heart-glad at the way it has been taken into people’s hearts and homes. There have been so many tales sent to us, of how people have shared it with loved ones living with dementia, of how it has helped people to cope with depression, of how it links generations in families, how teachers respond to it, and children also.
It has an amazing wild life. I love how people send us pictures of the book outside in the world, tucked up with children, the work that children have done with the book as catalyst.
FHR: The introduction to The Lost Words warns us that the rich landscape of wild imagination and wild play is rapidly fading from children’s minds. It’s been inspiring to see the efforts that have been made to make the book freely available to children through schools and libraries. Can you tell us some more about this?
JM: It began with a tweet from a lady in Scotland who saw how the book could connect children to nature again. She made it her mission to crowdfund to place a book in every school in Scotland. Her success snowballed into several other campaigns, and I think the Explorer’s Notes, which are a wonderful guide to using the book in schools, also helped with this. Now almost half of the UK schools, hospices over the whole of the UK, care homes in Wales and other institutions have been gifted the book by what has grown to be a great community of crowdfunders. Their energy and enthusiasm for the book and for working beyond its pages to reconnect the lives of children and adults to the more than human world around us all is wonderful.
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FHR: The notion of wild imagination and wild play is one that strikes a chord – are there signs of hope in rekindling wildness which you’ve become aware of?
JM: The young people who are rising up against the ignorance, arrogance and greed of older generations gives me hope. The new wave of politically minded and erudite youngsters put our politicians and their self-serving party politics to shame.
FHR: What role does myth and folklore play in your artistic practice and experience of the natural world?
In the same way that some people see themselves as set apart from the natural world, when they are in fact only the tiniest part of the wonderful biosphere, so are storytellers the new myth makers. As a species we are hardwired to learn through the power of story.
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I write, I illustrate, to try and make sense of the crazy world we live in, and my hope is that in so doing I help other people to do the same. And there are some powerful minds working in the field at the moment. Richard Powers’ Overstory is a case in point, teaching people to see, really see, and seek out the trees that every day are taken for granted.
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FHR: Having been being fascinated by peregrines as a boy while on holiday in Pembrokeshire I loved your book Queen of the Sky. For those who aren’t familiar with this book, could you say a little about the themes which you explore here?
JM: Queen of the Sky is a book about how a friend of mine found and rescued a wild peregrine falcon and released her back into the wild. It’s a story of great patience. A love story in a way, but one where something is loved so much that the person who loves it sets it free, to be as it should be. It’s a story about respect. And if H is for Hawk is a tale of how a woman was saved by a hawk, this is a tale of how a hawk is saved by a woman.
FHR: What landscapes particularly inspire you?
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JM: Terrestrial. Including the ocean, above and below.
FHR: I read that you have been learning to work with wood engravings. How has this been for you?
JM: I’ve moved away from wood engravings. My eyesight is perhaps not good enough for the fine detail. But also my language is liquid and sumi ink has taken over as my medium of choice. But as with everything it takes a lifetime to master. But I am learning.
FHR: In his book Being a Beast Charles Foster relays his experiences of seeking to live as animals such as badgers and foxes. I’m not sure whether you would want to go as far as eating worms as Foster has done, but I sense that through your art you are seeking to bring us closer to animals as fellow spirits?
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JM: I’ve not read it yet. I wanted to be a bear when I was young, but would happily become an otter. And most of my work is about shapeshifting.
FHR: To what extent do you think it is important to acknowledge that despite its beauty nature is also ‘red in tooth and claw’? Are there dangers in projecting human characteristics on to animals?
JM: I’m not a fan of ego-centric anthropomorphism if that’s what you mean. Is nature ‘red in tooth and claw’? That implies some morality? It’s not always kind. But we know so little about the world around us. It has so much to teach us. We just need to listen.
FHR: Which fellow artists and writers do you admire?
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JM: So many. I love Robin Hobb’s books. Robert Macfarlane is an exceptional writer, and I need to explore Richard Powers more. John Irving has long been a favourite of mine. Katherine Arden, James Mayhew, Brian Wildsmith, Chagall, Tunnicliffe, Alan Garner, Shaun Tan, Frieda Kahlo, Tom Bullough. Nicola Bailey, oh, so many. Picasso. Look at me with my gender imbalance of people who spring to mind! (Though Robin Hobb is a woman, who writes under a gender-neutral name, because many men don’t read books by women.)
FHR: What are you working on at the moment and what projects would you like to take forward in the future?
JM: I’m working with the finest group of musicians to make a cd/lp and show built around The Lost Words. I’m working on a book that was written almost a century ago, writing a forward to re-introduce it to the world and painting images to decorate/illustrate it [now published as The House Without Windows]. I’m working on a book called The Keeper of Lost Dreams that I hope will be a catalyst for dreaming and a solace for troubled souls in our curious and turbulent times. And I am beginning to work on a new book with Robert, but that’s under wraps at the moment until we understand more of what it is that we are making [Ed: this has now been published as The Lost Spells; other recent publications include Mrs Noah’s Garden, with James Mayhew, published by Otter-Barry Books and The Secret of the Tattered Shoes with Ehsan Abdollahi, a wonderful Iranian illustrator, published by Tiny Owl.]
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I’m also trying to take time to open my eyes to the wonderful wild world around me, wide as wide can be, and understand what is important, what time is, and how to live.
An interview with Jackie Morris
Posted on 12th August 2022 in Blog by Rebecca Connolly
Journalist David Whetstone spoke with the artist behind The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, Jackie Morris. Original artwork can be viewed at the new enchanting exhibition, The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices, at The Sill.
A booking showing an illustration of a Curlew taken in the Lost Spells exhibition room at The Sill
Listening to a Landscape of Voices.
Artist Jackie Morris and writer Robert MacFarlane are the creative duo behind The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Journalist David Whetstone talked to Jackie about The Lost Spells, the magic of birds, and what inspired the creation of yet another masterpiece…
An illustration of Red Fox by artist Jackie MorrisFox, from The Lost Spells. Copyright Jackie Morris
If you want a story of beauty, hope and optimism, head for The Sill, the national landscape discovery centre in the Northumberland National Park.
There you’ll find The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices, an exhibition of paintings, words and sounds that celebrates the rich diversity of the natural world so evident in this green place near Hadrian’s Wall.
The exhibition, a wonderful coup for The Sill, follows an earlier one, The Lost Words, whose story has been told before but here it is in a nutshell (that being a word that might or might not appear in the Oxford Junior Dictionary).
In 2007, the dictionary dropped nature-related words like ‘acorn’, ‘kingfisher’ and ‘wren’ to accommodate new words from the online world, such as ‘broadband’ and ‘blog’.
Compilers said the dictionary was reflecting the language used by children today. But it caused a kerfuffle, especially among the children of yesterday.
a photo of the Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices exhibition at The Sill, The Lost Spells book in foreground and art hanging on walls in backgroundThe Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices at The Sill
Artists, writers and naturalists signed a protest letter, saying there was a connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing, and arguing that if a word goes, the thing it represents becomes less visible.
Many things in nature are, of course, already under serious threat.
Among the letter’s signatories were Jackie Morris, artist and writer, and nature writer Robert Macfarlane who collaborated to make a beautiful book called The Lost Words.
Through Jackie’s illustrations and Robert’s poems, attention was drawn to the things we’re in danger of losing along with the words to describe them.
photograph of artist Jackie Morris, in an art studio settingArtist Jackie Morris. Credit Jay Armstrong
The book made a big impact. It spawned the first exhibition which opened at Compton Verney in the Midlands and was due to open at The Sill just as the first lockdown in 2020 brought the shutters down.
“What a beautiful place to be stuck in lockdown,” says Jackie wistfully. “I kind of wish I’d been there.”
She’s speaking on the phone from a basement flat in Hammersmith, cooking breakfast for her daughter who’s recovering from surgery. “Multi-tasking,” she says.
She agrees it’s not her natural habitat. Most of the time she’s in Pembrokeshire where she went “for the weekend” 30 years ago and stayed.
“I’m making the best of it,” she says. “There are green parakeets. They’re gorgeous, like yobbos as they scream around the sky. London is so used to them.
“But it’s terrifying the lack of birds here compared to when I was young and there were sparrows in all the hedges.”
Curlew, from The Lost Spells. Copyright Jackie Morris
She lived in London once. “I realised it wasn’t the place for me. I need space. I love the light you get by the sea and the dark sky. That’s something they have at The Sill.”
The first time she visited, after its cautious reopening, she had been through a dreadful time, losing her father just before the first lockdown. But she wanted to see how her work was displayed.
“I was absolutely blown away by the landscape at The Sill and by the way they’d hung the exhibition, and I loved the connection with the Northumberland National Park.
“I live in a national park and they’re so important for preserving landscape.”
The Lost Words exhibition is still touring (it’s in Bournemouth as we speak) but the project had generated momentum.
She says she didn’t know Robert Macfarlane personally before it all began. “He is, I think, one of the finest writers of his generation and actually an amazing thinker.”
The Lost Spells and The Lost Words
Signing the letter gave her a book idea and she wrote to him asking if he would write an introduction. After initially pleading a packed schedule, he wrote back, saying: “Can’t get this out of my head. Can we do something together?”
Initially, neither knew what would transpire. “But it’s gone out in so many directions and we’re working with so many different people,” says Jackie.
“Now there’s a beautiful thing called The Lost Sounds, an audiobook which is more than four hours of the wild as recorded by Chris Watson.”
He lives in Newcastle, I say. “He’s like a god,” enthuses Jackie.
The project also gave rise to the folk ensemble Spell Sounds which performed at the BBC Proms in 2019 and again at Sage Gateshead just recently, collaborating with new choir Voices of the River’s Edge.
Rachel Newton, of Spell Sounds, performed at The Sill for the opening of the new exhibition when National Park staff and others read poems from the books.
a man with grey hair facing a wall of paintings in the gallery at The Sill in the new exhibition The Lost Spells at The Sill
Jackie says she was so impressed with the way the first exhibition was treated at The Sill that she asked Sarah Burn, Northumberland National Park head of engagement, if a second could start there.
“I asked if it could be a tool for connecting people with the landscape. She made it happen really.”
Sarah, who of course was delighted, recalls: “We brought The Lost Words to The Sill but rather than treat it just as a touring exhibition, we embedded it into our programme.
“We took the key messages and tried to build on them. Jackie was so taken with the environment here that she was keen for us to do something with The Lost Spells which was to be published later that year.
“She has been incredibly generous with her artwork, trusting us to handle it sensitively. Robert, too. We wanted to adopt a more sensory approach, with listening, and make it compelling for children and everyone.”
Fox, from The Lost Spells. Copyright Jackie Morris
This they have done. Along with the wonderful words and pictures there’s a recorded soundscape featuring music, a Northumberland dawn chorus, seals ‘singing’ at Holy Island and the cry of a fox.
“We encourage you to listen with the ears of an owl, look with the eyes of an oak, call to a curlew or swoop with a swallow,” urges the accompanying text.
Children can dress up, write their own spells (poems) or handle the contents of a nature table, and there’s nothing to say adults can’t either.
The great advantage of this location is obvious. Outside lies the wild landscape that’s home to the creatures in the Morris/Macfarlane books and where children can play while relating those ‘lost’ words to what they see.
Jackie, in the basement flat, remembers staying in the inn next to The Sill and being thrilled to find swallows nesting under the window.
“I have my ears finely tuned to birdsong and I could hear them outside.”
two Children enjoying The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices at The Sill, wearing owl costumesChildren enjoying The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices at The Sill
The swallows flew into the exhibition as beautiful, intricate paintings, and into another book Jackie has just had published called Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone, although it contains no paintings.
Beguiling but hard to classify, she calls it “a lullaby in a minor key” and hopes it will find readers amid bookshops’ “cacophony of stories”.
Meanwhile she is collaborating again with Robert Macfarlane on a book dedicated to endangered birds, due out in 2024. No title yet. “But it’s going to get called The Lost Birds, isn’t it?
“What we’re trying to do is make birds visible to people who don’t see them because a lot of people pay them no regard.
“We want to enchant people with the utter wonder of what a bird is and does. People talk about birdbrains but you think, ‘Oh. My God… I wish’. Humans are so full of their cleverness but imagine being able to navigate by scent or the stars.”
Kittiwakes will be included and Jackie had just started sketching them when she had to travel up for a rescheduled Spell Songs concert at Sage Gateshead in June. She was a little perturbed.
An illustration of Owl by artist Jackie MorrisOwl, from The Lost Spells. Copyright Jackie Morris
But staying in the Jurys Inn on Gateshead Quay she was delighted to find them everywhere and awake to a seabird serenade.
“We have kittiwake colonies in Pembrokeshire and I was thinking it was ridiculous to have to leave when they’d just arrived. But they’re on the cliffs and difficult to get close to.
“Sitting on the viewing platform at BALTIC and sketching them for hours was magic. They show utter disregard for humans and I did get pooed on but took it as a blessing.”
The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices can be seen now and until June 4, 2023. Admission is free and The Sill is open daily, 10am to 5pm. Check www.thesill.org.uk for details.
The Lost Spells: Listening to a Landscape of Voices
Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris
In association with Penguin Books
Supported by the Community Foundation Tyne & Wear and Northumberland:
Morris, Jackie MRS NOAH'S SONG Otter-Barry (Children's None) $17.99 10, 1 ISBN: 978-1-913074-42-5
A matriarch shares the wonder of song.
Mrs Noah sings constantly while she sews, gardens, and wakes her children for a new day. The children ask where she learned to sing, and she looks sad as she replies, "Far away and long ago." When pressed by her youngest child, she elaborates that her mother and her grandmother were her teachers and that sadness can be good when reminiscing about people you love. In the verdant garden, Mrs Noah tells her children to close their eyes and listen. After a moment, the children hear birds singing, bees humming, and a breeze whispering in the leaves. They are amazed, but Mrs Noah says the garden sings best in the morning, just as the sun rises. Mr Noah sews a huge hammock so the family can sleep in the garden that night to be ready for the dawn. In Morris and Mayhew's latest adaptation of the Judeo-Christian story of Noah and the ark, life after the flood is once more enchanted and interwoven with nature. The imagery-rich text and lavish collage and mixed-media art create a harmonious composition that touches on themes of oral storytelling, generational art, and rebirth ("Does this happen every morning?" one child asks, to which Mrs Noah replies, "Every morning. A wild song to raise the sun"). The children have varying skin tones inherited from dark-skinned Mrs Noah and pale Mr Noah. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Dulcet elegance. (Religious picture book. 4-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Morris, Jackie: MRS NOAH'S SONG." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715352990/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7f32cac1. Accessed 2 Jan. 2023.
The Lost Spells
Robert Macfarlane, illus. by Jackie Morris. Anansi International, $26 (120p) ISBN 978-1-487007799
Macfarlane and Morris reunite to conjure the wonder of goldfinches and gorse, foxes and snow hares in this second volume of illustrated poems designed to spark a deeper love and appreciation for the natural world. But where their The Lost Words exhilarated, with its defiant reclamation of discarded dictionary words, this collection's songs both describe and lament, swerving between ecstatic highs and plangent notes of sorrow: "Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear.... But there has always been singing in dark times--and wonder is needed now more than ever." Macfarlane's lyrics--often, though not always, structured as acrostics--ring with consonance ("Thrift thrives where most life fails, falls,/ is cast adrift") and wordplay ("Woodpecker, tree-wrecker") to limn 21 ordinary wonders of the British countryside, many of which are also common North American species. Morris's fluid artwork renders the elegant tilt of a fox's snout, birds' calligraphic flight patterns, and the eyelike whorls of silver birch bark. The glossary--"at once a puzzle and a key"--identifies each species depicted, turning poetry to practicality and allowing this petite volume to do double-duty as an artful field guide. One to treasure. All ages.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Lost Spells." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 49, 2 Dec. 2020, p. 94. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646895947/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7cc7d0cc. Accessed 2 Jan. 2023.