Opening Reception Friday 14 September at 6pm • Curated by Jennette Donnelly

’Nature and Deeds’ is an exhibition by Dublin based artist Stephen Morris.

The exhibition consists of 18 works, both painting and drawings that examine approaches to painting through visibility and physicality.

In conversation with the artist, Morris speaks about his interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud and influential phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty. He talks about his obsession with religion and morality. Freud’s theory on the ‘oceanic’ and the longing for something beyond the self, and Ponty’s ideas surrounding the natural order of vision inflicted on the world by man, run simultaneously in ‘nature and Deeds’.

Physicality is an important aspect to Morris’s approach to making work.

It is evident in some of the works exhibited that the artist has beaten and disfigured the frames and surfaces, before salvaging them and attempting to repair with paint. In some of the works, it is the physicality of the paint set within a scene, that imply it’s figurative elements. Whereas, in others, it’s the simplicity of line and it’s interaction with space.

The artist is curious as to how he functions in space. His awareness of his own self and his relationship to things in the world around him. Morris, the artist, is a physical being who attempts to absorb the movement and space that other things occupy in the world. It is then the duty of him, as the painter, to record these interactions.​

Morris, the artist, is not just a pair of eyes suspended in space that scans the periphery, or a digital collector. He is an operational being with the senses of touch and vision. It is only through living, being visually present that Morris believes that you can ‘take a thing’s likeness…turning things inside out…metaphysics’.

​Through these methods of making and thinking Morris makes paintings that examine the relationships between figuration and abstraction with a variety of themes such as power and pleasure principles, devotion, sexuality, morality, narcissism and religion.