Julia Morison

Artist in Residence: July – September 2010

Julia Morison (b. Pahiatua, Aotearoa New Zealand) is based in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her extensive studio practice encompasses a variety of media, from painting and photography to sculpture and installation. A roving intellectual spirit, throughout her esteemed career Morison has experimented with diverse approaches to the mediums she works in to create visual and sculptural systems that explore numinous worlds. Morison is perhaps best known for her formal abstract paintings in which geometry, symbology and biology are combined to shape graphic worlds finely balanced between the sacred and profane.

Morison has exhibited extensively in public and private galleries throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. In 1988 Morison was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and in 1990 the Moet & Chandon fellowship and art residency in Epernay, France where she continued to live and work until her return to Christchurch in 1999. In 2005 she received an Arts Foundation Laureate award and in 2006, Julia Morison: a loop around a loop, an important survey of her work, selected by Justin Paton and Felicity Milburn, was presented in Christchurch Art Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery. In 2010 she was included in the Biennale Of Sydney, with a major work installed at the Sydney Opera House. Morison has completed several major public artworks including Wooorm/Ouroborus, Dunedin Botanical Gardens, Dunedin (2013) and Tree Houses for Swamp Dwellers, Christchurch (2013). Her work is held in all major public collections throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent exhibitions include Head[case], Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch (2019), The River Lie, Suter Gallery, Nelson (2017) and Spirit Level, Yellow House Gallery Sydney (2016).