Mary Akemi Morris is a watercolour and acrylic painter born in the internment camp of Tashme, British Columbia in 1945 and now based in London, Ontario.
She is a graduate of Fine Arts, University of Toronto and has taught art in secondary schools in North York and London, Ontario.
In 2019, she exhibited her art at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, in “Tashme Sisters” with her sister, Miiko Barb Gravlin.
She also displayed her painting, “Vanishing” at the Aurora Cultural Centre’s climate change exhibition, “Letters to the Earth, Between Despair and Hope” in the summer of 2023.
Artist Statement
My landscape paintings have an ongoing fascination with nature with its infinite variety, mystery and complex connection with humans.
Any Japanese association is not immediately apparent in my art. But I feel that the cultural lessons learned from my Japanese Canadian experience, especially in the Japanese reverence for nature, have had a profound influence on my identity and, therefore, in the development of my paintings.
