Morris' elegant mimicry fails to connect

William Morris can make glass look like bone, stone, horn, tusk, pottery or hide, and that ability to fool the eye is behind much of his work in "Myth, Object and the Animal — A Mid-Career Survey" at Tacoma's Museum of Glass.

Morris creates objects of great elegance and refinement, often mimicking the forms of ancient artifacts in complex installations like anthropology museum displays. The acclaimed Stanwood-based artist started his career as an assistant at Pilchuck in 1975 and later worked for Dale Chihuly. Now his work is included in public and museum collections around the country.

The surfaces of Morris' glass objects are extraordinary, with subtle color, markings and gradations. The 36-foot-long installation "Cache"(1993) looks like an archaeological trove of huge animal tusks scattered with human skeletal remains, all fashioned of glass. "Artifact Panel" stretches along a wall of the museum with dozens of small objects — various-shaped vessels and ritual pieces — fastened by protruding mounts and casting multiple shadows behind them.

Beyond my amazement at the skill behind the work, though, I find little to connect with. Morris appropriates imagery from other times, other cultures, without seeming to get beyond the rich surfaces. The exhibition catalog is similarly polished, with many full-page pictures of the handsome artist at work in the hot shop.

In the exhibition, the work I found most affecting is a recent series of "Cinerary Urns," which don't strive for meaning beyond the formal perfection and solemn purpose for which they were crafted. Morris has written that he began making the urns after the death of his mother and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With glass that looks like carved stone or sumptuously glazed ceramic, Morris forms heavy-lidded vessels of various sizes, each flawlessly simple in line. The starkness of the objects is their strength, so it's a shame that Morris so prominently inscribed the date of Sept. 11, 2001, on a number of the larger urns, giving them a jarring commercialism.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com