Bio

Julia Morison ONZM graduated with honours from the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1975. Since that time, she has exhibited extensively in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, including twice at the Sydney Biennale (1992 and 2010). In 1988 she was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and in 1990 she undertook the Moët & Chandon contemporary art residency in Avize, France. She was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2005.

In the context of Te Haerenga Collection she is very much the senior artist, whose practice has been influential within Aotearoa for four decades. Her conceptual programme across painting, sculpture and large-scale museum-based installations is informed by a wide-ranging basket of formal systems including Euclidean geometry, formal abstraction and constructivism, number symbolism and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Her works are notable for a diverse range of materials including gold and other precious metals, blood, clay, beeswax and the results of metallurgical processes.

Te Haerenga Collection curator Hamish Coney explains that Morison and this work Spellbound 1 (2019) occupy a key position within the collection. ‘Julia Morison’s presence in the collection is at odds with many of the other artists, where the accent is on emerging practitioners. Morison has been a force in the art of Aotearoa since the 1980s. She is very much the senior figure, the godmother of the collection. It is quite touching to see the reaction of some of the younger artists when they see their work hanging alongside Morison’s. She is a highly respected figure. Spellbound 1 demonstrates why this is the case. It is a work of slowly emanating force as emergent pigment forms, like exotic underwater species, are created from within the “body” of the preceding, swelling and flowering out from the depths and beyond the picture plane. Much of Morison’s practice is based on esoteric or symbolic formulae that drive a set of arcane relationships between materials and geometric outcomes. This work is organic and activated, speaking to the generative potency of the creative act. Painting as parable and metaphor is a space long held by Morison; this work brings a soulful majesty to the collection and the inspiration of a practising artist of some fifty years standing.’

Exhibitions

• 2024   City Gallery Wellington: Julia Morison: Ode to Hilma
• 2022   Trish Clark Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: In hindsight
• 2020–21         Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Tauranga Art Gallery; Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui: Head[case]
• 2021   Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki: All That Was Solid Melts
• 2017   Suter Gallery, Whakatū Nelson: The River Lie
• 2006   Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū: Julia Morison: a loop around a loop