Julia Morison In Conversation With Dr Kirsty Baker

Come together and celebrate the opening of our Summer exhibition season. Join us for an afternoon of programmes offering a deeper understanding of artworks and artists as you explore our three new shows, Ahsin Ahsin: Turbo Croc 2.0, Julia Morison: Ode to Hilma and Michael Mahne Lamb: Through Points.

Join artist Julia Morison and curator Dr Kirsty Baker, for a discussion about her new series of large-scale painting series Ode to Hilma.

Made in extended response to the work of Hilma af Klint – specifically to the set of ten paintings collectively referred to as ‘the ten largest’ – is staged in the same gallery space that af Klint’s ‘ten largest’ were exhibited in 2021-22.

This ambitious new suite of paintings will be presented alongside her 2022 work Vademecum II. Comprised of 100 pages, Vademecum II can be reconfigured according to a range of organisational logics. Morison’s exhibition is an exploration into the power that artistic forms and materials hold to convey symbolic meaning and offers a consideration of thematic resonances between these two distinctive artists.
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Julia Morison

Julia Morison’s ongoing practice – incorporating painting, sculpture, photography and installation – is consistently underpinned by a complex symbolic system. She frequently works within self-imposed parameters, whether numerical, material or organisational.

Her vocabulary is inspired by esoteric and spiritual sources, such as Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, alchemy, and memory systems. Morison’s work has come to represent her own intellectual order through an interweaving of symbol, material and philosophy, re-interpreting or reviewing for a contemporary context. Morison’s work invites us to reflect on the ways structures manipulate the way we see things, with her interpretations offering a metaphor for other such systems and encouraging us to consider systems themselves.

Much of her artistic exploration probes into the ways that meaning can be shaped and reconfigured through the use of ten symbolic materials, from clay and ash, to silver and gold. Fascinated by the ways that we systematise our understanding of the world around us, Morison draws on a range of knowledge systems, from the arcane to the contemporary.

Recent exhibitions include; Live another day, Nadene Milne Gallery, Christchurch, (2023); 3(.)6 degrees of separation, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, (2022), Hindsight, Trish Clark Gallery, (2022), Omnium Gatherum: Alembic, Sumer Gallery, Tauranga, (2021), All That Is Solid Melts, Auckland Art Gallery, (2021) and Head[case], Tauranga Art Gallery, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, Sargeant Gallery, Whanganui, (2021) Objectspace, Auckland (2020) and Christchurch Art Gallery, (2019).

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