Though Tim Morris drew and painted as a child, his preferred genre, from a very early age, was sculpture. "By about aged nine, I'd carved a birdbath into a block of granite at the back of our house,”he says, adding that at this time he had also "started to melt lead and free-hand pour shapes onto the floor and then hammer them. I was fascinated with mercury as a metal and would marvel at its behaviour as I pushed it around the kitchen table”.
Morris's creativity and talent should come as no surprise. His parents, sculptor Frank Morris and painter Camille Souter, were extraordinary. Morris was only five when his father died and he has "little or no memory of him... luckily, kids just get on with doing stuff”.
And of his mother: "Camille would bring me to her studio and put me under the table. Apparently I played with a mouse while Camille worked. The smell of turpentine, oils and cigarette smoke was wonderful.
"My daughter Fiona reminds me of [her] sleeping on a pile of polystyrene in the foundry when I had to work late. It must be a family thing.”
Creativity, he says, was "certainly encouraged, but not in a formal way”.
"I spent good times with Camille as we went to visit steelworks, scrap dealers, fish markets, canals and quarries, all fascinating to me at a young age. If I showed an interest in something, Camille would be very encouraging and helpful.”
Growing up in the Wicklow mountains, Morris says he was "definitely a hands-on boy. No television, so myself and my sisters did stuff to keep occupied. In my case, keeping hens, pigeons, shooting air rifles, driving banger cars and borrowing Camille's Honda... all the activities a young boy needed.”
Formal education began at Avoca and Kingstown primary school in Blackrock. Morris then went to Villiers in Limerick as a boarder. "It was very clear that I was not academically gifted or brilliant on the hockey pitch, so I made the decision to leave after four years and follow another path,” he says.
That path led to Roe & O'Neill granite quarry where, aged 15, Morris began working as a stone cutter. "I was extremely privileged to be accepted as an apprentice stone cutter through Anco [a forerunner of FÁS]. I'd found my people,” he says.
"The men took me under their wing and trained me in the working of granite. I was a young lad in a potentially dangerous environment, but the kindness of the men and care was profound. If you fecked up they would let you know, too.”
Paddy Roe and Phil O'Neill's quarry had many sculptors working on commissions. "I worked with my godfather Michael Biggs, Imogen Stuart, Cliodhna Cussen, Dick Joynt,” Morris says. "It was a brilliant time and I also got to travel around Ireland on church jobs. The best was Monaghan Cathedral, which I feel is mine.”
Having finished his apprenticeship, Morris spent 1985-1987 in Carrara, Tuscany. "It was arranged by Dublin sculptor John Coen whose help was very important to me, he was a wonderful person. Arriving in Carrara was a shock to me. Everyone was brilliant at carving stone, I wasn't. Luckily, I met Robert Schoen, from New Orleans, and became his assistant.”
Morris works big - for example, his sculpture The Flyer in Bohola - and he works small, as in his latest exhibition Boxcars, 200 of them made over five years, 2020-2025.
Pandemic restrictions led him to working with what he had: cardboard boxes.
"I started tearing up bits of cardboard and assembled a few boxcars, a goods yard with nothing moving, no engine. I continued working with the idea of restricted lives and was thinking a lot about the iconic boxcars of America, the land of opportunity and commerce, the hobos jumping trains and the vastness of the landscape.”
One hundred boxcars were made in Foxford, Co Mayo, where Morris is based. "Last year I loaded up the old jeep and headed to North Africa, and ended up staying in a small town at the bottom of the Atlas Mountains. There was plenty of cardboard and litter about so I started to make more boxcars.”
Each bronze boxcar was "cast in 14 sections and then assembled, tig-welded together” in Morris's own foundry in Foxford. "The final colour was a combination of iron nitrate and white paint, the undercarriage was left raw.”
All 200 of them are now on display at Solomon Fine Art.
Solo exhibition 'Boxcars' by Tim Morris is at Solomon Fine Art, Dublin 2 until January 31. timmorrisartist.com
