What does ‘mórí’ mean?
I don’t believe it means just one thing. For me it is a culmination of so many things, each one adding a new nuance to it. There are layers to it.
…Kinda like a print, huh?
If we want to go down the language route, let’s turn to Irish. Seems reasonable, considering Ireland is where I grew up.
There are many ways to address grandmother: nanna, gran, granny, mamó, etc. For me and my siblings, our grandmother was called Móirí. Did I know anyone else who called their gran that? No. It seemed unique to our family, traced back to Donegal where my Móirí grew up. My mom had a móirí, my móirí had a móirí, and so on and so forth. (Up until maybe 10 I thought that was her actual name and got so confused whenever someone asked if ‘Rita’ was around.) She was married to the local doctor. She was a pharmacist. She was a mother. And then in her seventies, after all six of her children had grown up, she decided to go back to college to study art. Phenomenal.
She’s the reason I stuck with art. (Not because I loved it, it was mostly to stop her nagging at me.) You see, she loved art, whereas I went to college for it because I didn’t know what else to choose at eighteen years of age. My view on it has since changed, obviously, otherwise how would I be where I am today? She pushed me and I am glad for it. I owe a lot to her.
So MÓRÍ felt like a fitting name for my brand.
grandmother
Móirí / mórí
But that’s not all there is to it. As you can see, the spelling isn’t quite right, is it? It’s missing an ‘i’. This is where my interest in Japanese culture comes into play. You see, the word MORI also exists in the Japanese language. It is written as 森 and it means forest. The kanji consists of three repeated characters, the one for ‘tree’ 木. Makes sense, three trees make a forest, as they say.
I’m a printmaker that predominantly uses woodcut as my technique. I love the Japanese/Eastern methods of carving and inking and have been inspired by the likes of Hokusai. Wood is very much a part of my brand. So there you are, another layer.
forest
Mori means forest and there is so much that the word ‘forest’ conjures up in my mind. I think of The Grimm Fairy Tales that I grew up with, of dark forests where magic swirls and lingers in the shadows of beasts and witches. I think of a Baba Yaga in her hut, mixing herbs to make potions, her hut on the move, pushing through the trees with giant chicken legs. I think of where I grew up, surrounded by trees of all kinds in the Clare countryside. I think of hikes I have gone on, of tree trunks so wide I can’t wrap my arms around them, of branches that block out the light and leave speckled shadows on the ground that move with the breeze, and of moss covered stones from long forgotten walls.
Forests are nostalgia.
The name Móirí and the art of Japanese printmaking are both surrounded by tradition.
These concepts, nostalgia and tradition, (with a little bit of mystic whimsy) are all things which I strive to capture in my art.
