Pard Morrison exhibition opening remarks from 5.21.26.
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that sculpture is never experienced in isolation. It is always shaped by context—by light, by weather, by architecture, by memory and especially by landscape. These sculptures were made specifically for this environment, and I truly believe they could not exist in the same way anywhere else.
The title “Chromatecture” combines two ideas that are central to my process: color and structure. Color as an emotional and perceptual experience, and structure as a way of organizing space, rhythm and movement. The exhibition is really an attempt to explore how color can behave architecturally—how it can build space, create movement, establish rhythm and influence our emotional relationship to the environment around us.
But more than anything, this show is about relationships.
The relationship between sculpture and garden.
Between geometry and organic growth.
Between construction and intuition.
Between permanence and constant change.
And between human beings and the natural world.
Over the course of making these ten sculptures, I found myself thinking less like an object-maker and more like a gardener or landscape architect. That realization became increasingly important to me throughout the process.
At first glance, welding aluminum sculptures and designing gardens might appear to have very little in common. One is industrial and fabricated. The other is organic and living. But the deeper I went into this body of work, the more I began to recognize that the underlying principles are remarkably similar.
Landscape architecture is fundamentally about relationships: scale, pacing, repetition, variation, circulation, contrast, tension, harmony and seasonal change.
Those same ideas exist in sculpture.
When a landscape architect designs a garden, they are composing experiences over time. They are thinking about how color emerges in spring, matures in summer, softens in autumn and recedes in winter. They are thinking about rhythm—where density increases, where openness appears, where the eye rests, where movement accelerates.
I realized that I was approaching these sculptures in very much the same way.
The placement of every shape and every color on these surfaces operates almost like a planting plan. Certain colors cluster together like perennial drifts. Others punctuate space the way flowering plants suddenly appear within a field of greens. Some passages quiet down. Others become energetic and loud. There are moments of compression and moments of release. Moments of harmony and moments of disruption.
And those decisions were deeply informed by spending time here in the gardens.
I walked these paths repeatedly while developing this work. I paid attention to how greens are never just green. How shadows cool certain colors while sunlight intensifies others. How flowers appear almost impossibly saturated against muted foliage. How certain combinations of color feel calm while others feel electric.
Nature is an extraordinary colorist.
And yet what fascinates me most is that nature rarely organizes color randomly. There is structure beneath apparent spontaneity. There are systems, rhythms, repetitions and variations constantly unfolding around us.
That realization shaped this exhibition profoundly.
Each sculpture began with observation—not just visual observation, but emotional observation. I wanted to understand how the gardens felt psychologically as much as visually.
Some areas of the gardens feel meditative and restrained.
Others feel exuberant and celebratory.
Some feel intimate and enclosed.
Others expansive and luminous.
I wanted the sculptures to participate in those emotional conditions rather than simply occupy space within them. The fabrication process itself became deeply connected to these ideas.
All of the sculptures in this exhibition are fabricated from 3/16-inch plate aluminum. I cut and weld each form individually. There is something incredibly satisfying about taking flat industrial material and transforming it into a vertical structure that begins to carry presence, personality and even vulnerability.
Welding is both precise and physical. It requires measurement, engineering and technical control, but it also demands intuition. Every seam carries evidence of decision-making. Every angle influences how light travels across the surface.
In many ways, fabrication mirrors gardening. A gardener works with structure, too. So does a landscape architect.
There is excavation, planning, layering, maintenance, adjustment, revision and patience. There is constant negotiation between control and unpredictability.
And honestly, that balance is something I think about all the time in the studio.
How much do I determine?
How much do I allow to emerge?
How much order is necessary before vitality disappears?
One of the things I love about gardens is that they are composed environments that still retain aliveness. They are designed, but they breathe. They change daily.
I wanted these sculptures to hold some version of that quality.
Although the forms themselves are fixed and geometric, the experience of them is constantly changing. Light alters them every hour. Weather transforms them. Clouds flatten certain colors and intensify others. Morning light creates softness. Evening light deepens saturation and shadow.
Even your movement around the sculptures changes them.
As you walk, alignments shift.
Color relationships reorganize themselves.
Edges appear and disappear.
Certain forms flatten while others become dimensional.
The work is never static.
And that feels important to me because the garden itself is never static.
The surfaces are finished using Tnemec Fluoronar coatings applied by hand. I love the contradiction embedded in that material. Fluoronar is industrial, durable, architectural. It’s designed to survive weather and time. Yet when applied by hand, it becomes intimate and sensitive.
That balance matters to me. I’m interested in creating surfaces that feel structurally clear but emotionally open. I often think about color not as decoration, but as emotional architecture.
Color has weight.
Temperature.
Psychological resonance.
Memory.
Certain colors can slow us down. Others can energize us. Some create calm. Others create tension or joy.
At the core of this work is honestly a very simple intention: I want the sculptures to convey love and happiness.
Not sentimentality.
Not optimism in a naïve sense.
But generosity.
Openness.
A sense of emotional possibility.
We live in a time where irony often dominates contemporary culture. Cynicism can sometimes feel easier than sincerity. But I’ve become increasingly interested in the radical possibility of creating work that genuinely offers joy, tenderness, stillness and connection.
That desire has guided this exhibition from the beginning. And in many ways, the artists and writers who have influenced me most have reinforced that direction.
Mary Oliver has been enormously important to me while making this work. What I admire so deeply about her poetry is her attentiveness. She teaches us how to notice. How to slow down enough to recognize the extraordinary within ordinary experience.
Her poems are not simply about nature. They are about presence. About learning how to inhabit the world more fully.
There’s a line by Mary Oliver that I think about often:
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
That sentence has stayed with me for years. Because I think making sculpture is also an act of devotion through attention.
Looking carefully.
Observing patiently.
Remaining open to subtlety.
The gardens encourage that same kind of attention. They invite us to notice gradual change, delicate shifts, fleeting conditions. And I hope the sculptures participate in that invitation.
Agnes Martin has also been profoundly influential for me. Her paintings possess an incredible quietness and restraint, yet emotionally they can feel immense. She understood that subtle variation could carry tremendous power. When you stand in front of one of her paintings, you begin to notice that what initially appears minimal is actually deeply alive.
Tiny shifts matter.
Rhythm matters.
Breathing space matters.
I think her work taught me that clarity and sensitivity are not opposites. Precision can still hold emotion. That lesson became especially important while developing the surfaces for “Chromatecture.”
Anne Truitt has similarly been a major influence. Her sculptures carry this extraordinary introspective presence. They are architectural, but also deeply human. Color in her work feels internal somehow—as though it emerges from memory or emotion rather than merely surface treatment.
I admire the stillness in her work.
The dignity.
The restraint.
The psychological depth held within apparently simple forms.
Seeing Anne Truitt’s sculptures years ago expanded my understanding of what vertical form could do emotionally. That influence absolutely echoes throughout this exhibition.
I think all three of these influences—Mary Oliver, Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt—share something essential: an understanding that quietness can be powerful.
That slowness matters.
That subtlety matters.
That attention matters.
And in many ways, this exhibition asks viewers to slow down. Not because the sculptures demand explanation, but because they reward presence.
The longer you spend with them, the more they shift.
The more relationships emerge.
The more the surrounding landscape begins to participate in the work itself.
One of my favorite things about installing these sculptures throughout The Gardens has been watching them enter into dialogue with the environment.
Sometimes a sculpture suddenly echoes nearby flowers.
Sometimes it contrasts sharply against surrounding greens.
Sometimes it almost disappears into the landscape.
And other times it becomes a kind of visual interruption—a concentrated moment of heightened color and structure within organic space.
I love those shifting relationships. The sculptures are not intended to replicate nature. They are abstractions. But they are abstractions built from observation and emotional response to the landscape.
In a way, they function almost like instruments of perception.
They draw attention back outward.
Back toward the gardens.
Back toward light.
Back toward color.
Back toward change itself.
And I think that reciprocal relationship is what makes exhibiting here so meaningful.
This is not a neutral white-cube gallery. This is a living environment. The work exists within weather, birdsong, wind, humidity, seasonal growth and shifting light conditions.
The sculptures become participants within an ecosystem rather than isolated art objects. That feels deeply important to me. Especially now. I think many of us are searching for experiences that reconnect us—to place, to slowness, to sensory awareness and to each other.
Gardens do that. Art can do that, too. And when the two come together thoughtfully, something very special becomes possible.
My hope for “Chromatecture” is ultimately very simple:
I hope the work creates moments of pause.
Moments of heightened seeing.
Moments where color feels emotionally alive.
Moments where geometry softens into something unexpectedly human.
Moments where viewers feel a little more connected—to themselves, to the gardens and to the people around them.
I also hope the exhibition honors the extraordinary work already happening here at The Gardens on Spring Creek. The horticultural design throughout this space is remarkable. The intelligence, sensitivity and care embedded within these landscapes deeply inspired me throughout this process.
I hope you’ll spend time wandering through The Gardens, revisiting the sculptures in changing light, noticing how the work shifts as your own perception shifts. Because ultimately, “Chromatecture” is not only about sculpture.
It’s about attention.
It’s about relationships.
It’s about color as a living experience.
And it’s about the possibility that carefully composed spaces—whether gardens, landscapes, poems, paintings or sculptures—might help us experience the world with greater sensitivity, openness and love.