In Conversation: Public Art Trail Artists - Peter Morris + Misha Milovanovich

June 24, 2023 - 11 a.m.
Gallery 11

Join KCAW Director, Vestalia Chilton, in a forum with artists, Peter Morris and Misha Milovanovich, exploring themes and ideas around their installations, as part of Kensington + Chelsea Art Week 2023.

The Wendy House Cloud House by Peter Morris, Napoleon Garden, Holland Park

The installation is a scale model of The Cloud House, by Peter Morris, simplified and reconfigured as an open-frame Wendy House and public sculpture, created especially for KCAW Art Trail 2023.

The Cloud House concept is born out of the desire to create a public artwork where children can play, and have their imaginations piqued; and where adults can experience a moment of delight that will remind them of their own childhoods.

A Wendy House is a playhouse named after the character Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, written by J.M. Barrie, who lived in Kensington. As an object for play, this little Cloud House embraces the joyful spirit of Peter Pan, and celebrates the glorious pastel colours of some of Chelsea’s prettiest streets – the area that had a powerful impact on the development of Morris’s’ own creativity and the realisation of dreams.

Misha Milovanovich, installation on view in High Street Kensington

Misha’s work is often a symphonic abstraction. Her colourful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. She combines depth and surface relief, orchestrating bold contrasts of form, texture and space in her pictures. An intimate colour palette of bodily fluids - red, pink, white, black, yellow and brown - animate the writhing forms and the refracted memories of cartoonish cultural production.

A cultural polymath, Misha is constantly engaged in observing society and it’s distortions of desire, lust and attitudes to the body. Traditional techniques have been studied and absorbed and although her work is partly conceptual, it’s execution always reflects these hard-won technical abilities.

Her sculpture is on show in High Street Kensington.

Peter Morris. Primarily an architect, who has been running his own practice – Peter Morris Architects – for over a decade. But his other creative work – as an artist, illustrator, model-maker and designer of products and interiors – has always sat alongside his architectural work, and he loves to bring the colour, quirkiness and joy of his artworks to his buildings wherever possible.

The sculpture on display in Kensington & Chelsea this summer is a Wendy House version of a house that Peter is about to start building for his family, in North London, called The Cloud House – and the story of how this lifelong dream came into being has deep roots in the West London. In Peter’s own words: “Thirty-five years ago, I was living in the Midlands. My mum worked in a factory. My dad worked as a shepherd. And we had no money. It was a world away from Chelsea. I was dyslexic, had been to 12 secondary schools, and had two GCSEs to my name. But then something miraculous happened. I started dreaming, and I started drawing. Thanks to my drawings, I won a place to study Architecture at university. And in 1997 I was offered a place at the Royal College of Art. I moved to the Kings Road, and it blew my mind.

This magical place, Chelsea – with its stylish people, and streets of pretty pastel-coloured houses – combined with the brilliant creativity I was encountering at the RCA, changed my life forever. It was a place beyond imagination, a place of wonder and delight. And it’s where my dream was born – to build, one day, a pretty pink house for my future family. Now, aged 51, that dream is about to come true. The Cloud House – a fairytale pink palace with a cloud-shaped roof – is to be built at last, in Gospel Oak. Chelsea won’t be its home, but it will forever be the place that led to its creation.”

Peter’s Cloud House Wendy House draws on the fact that Wendy House playhouses are named after the character Wendy Darling from Peter Pan – and is a nod to the book’s author, JM Barrie, who lived opposite Kensington Gardens. It is an open-frame public sculpture in which children can play, and have their imaginations piqued; and where adults can experience a moment of delight to remind them of their own childhoods. As an object for play, this little Cloud House embraces the joyful spirit of Peter Pan, and celebrates the glorious pastel colours of some of Chelsea’s prettiest streets; but as a piece of public sculpture it acts as a tribute to – and a personal thank you for – the powerful impact that this neighbourhood had on the development of Peter Morris’s own creativity and the realisation of his dreams. Commenting on the theme of this year’s Kensington & Chelsea Art Week, Peter said: “Kensington & Chelsea changed me, and this artwork reflects and celebrates that change.”

Misha Milovanovich. A Belgrade-born artist living and working in London since 1988. Misha works across several mediums, from sculpture to painting, ceramics and performance. Misha’s work is always spirited, humorous and filled with joy. Her playful totemic sculptures, reflect a kind of prism which defines a new form of appropriation and reference-making. Characterised by a profusion of exuberant colors and shapes, energetic visual cadences, Misha blurs boundaries—between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, flatness and dimensionality, formalism and conceptualism—demonstrating the richness of the middle ground between opposites.

In her most recent work Misha’s unique aesthetics absorbs network of influences with centres around primitive and mythology. These are anthropomorphic creations that exude warmth and humour and perform (nod/homagge) to Miro, Picasso, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Noguchi.

Her work blends animal shapes and shapes of nature always giving it human quality, that of primeval man that still resides in cerebellum part of our brain and is lost in the age of post-truth world that finds its self digitally displaced. Her work relates to human condition and our connection with natural world and our selves, yet offers optimism in the face of contemporary absurdity. Everything connects to her biography - lived experiences, learned techniques, jokes, memories and eulogies.

Misha puts her sculptures through complex processes of fragmentation, casting, recasting, gluing, cutting, creating forms and enlarging. Her latest sculptures are concerned with themes of femininity, entropy, fragmentation, rejuvenation, plants, flowers, seasons in nature, art history, and processes such as of growth, life, dying and recycling.

Misha completed her BA HONS Fine Art degree at Central St. Martins School of Art in London in 1997.

Further details: www.kcaw.co.uk/kcaw-art-trail