Darrel Morris heard about the horrible fate of three-legged chicks–pecked to death by their own mothers–long before he turned it into embroidery. It was back when he was a kid, growing up on the hardscrabble remains of a family farm in rural Kentucky, trying desperately to fit in well enough to survive.
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The third of four children, Morris was the regular target of his father’s wrath. A gangly, shy kid (“always too tall for my age”), he was useless at sports and, as an undiagnosed dyslexic, a disaster in school. Mostly he hung out with his grandmother, who taught him to braid the rags she sewed into rugs and entertained him with tales of family lore: the uncle who was the seventh son of a seventh son and could cure diseases; the marriageable daughter who greeted a rich suitor with shit on her face. When he drew pictures, she hung them on her walls.
The 17 Morris embroideries in the current show at Wood Street Gallery make it clear that his Kentucky childhood is undergoing the intense recycling that turns experience into art. In one piece after another, a powerful, blaming father figure faces off against a cringing, hapless child. The father is likely to be a florid giant in an appliqued herringbone suit, his anger pulsing through a dense skin of multicolored sewing thread; the child, a mere outline–a transparent wisp, backed into a corner and in danger of disappearing altogether. The theme is repeated at home, on a baseball field, and eventually in corporate offices.
