THE BACKSTORY

In 2023, Donna Morin visited the Motherwell Foundation in New York. Meeting with Katy Rogers, Director and author of Motherwell's Catalogue Raisonné, Morin witnessed how the master approached his practice with daily devotion — seeing his brushes, his daily drawings, his intimate collages.

The experience left her energized and ready to make larger prints in her own practice, but when the ink wouldn't dry and the results disappointed, she tore them up, intending to discard them entirely. Instead, those torn failures became the foundation for something new. Morin has always kept a drawer full of Asian motif papers collected over the years, beautiful sheets covered in patterns and letter shapes she can't read but has always found captivating. Growing up 45 minutes from San Francisco, with its vibrant Chinatown and Asian influences, she developed an instinctive attraction to these forms. In Ancient Voice, she began piecing these papers together with her torn prints, using everything for its formal elements rather than literal meaning.

Collage, for Morin, is about memory and intuition. It's about piecing together the evidence of making, capturing what has gone before through the mind's eye and the senses. Ancient Voice positions her work within postmodernism while remaining informed by ancient principles and the formal tenets of 20th-century modernism—those Asian letterforms carry centuries of aesthetic tradition even as Morin uses them purely for their visual power.

The process is not didactic but intuitive, about sharing something unknown. Once made visual, meaning becomes clear to both maker and viewer—something that didn't exist before suddenly resonates with truth. Ancient Voice speaks across time: ancient symbols meet contemporary gesture, Motherwell's influence mingles with Eastern aesthetics, and what began as failure transforms into discovery.