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Morgan Stokes: Negotiating Between Tactility and Subtlety
Morgan Stokes is an artist deeply engaged with exploring the potentialities of materials, creating works that challenge and activate perception and expression, whether contained within a frame hung on a wall or unleashed into the expanse of space. His work negotiates between tactility and subtlety, leaving something vital hanging in the balance and reflecting his intent to mediate human experience through material exploration. Writer Tiffany Jade’s interview with Morgan delves into his creative processes and the philosophical underpinnings of his work, revealing how his practice seeks to evoke a dialogue between the viewer and the material world.
Open Journal (OJ): Tell us about your art practice and processes.
Morgan Stokes (MS): Based in Sydney, I work across painting and sculpture. I often break down the traditional elements of each—canvas, stretcher bars, pigment, stone—and rebuild or reinterpret them. I try to reconsider each component as both material and metaphor, with the goal of examining the potential of painting to reflect our increasingly disembodied, digital condition.
OJ: How did you arrive at where you are now? Conceptually speaking. How did your work evolve into a place that homes in on material purity, making that the crux of art?
MS: I used to work as a digital designer, so most of my time was spent staring at screens. After the pandemic, especially, I realised how disembodied life had become, and I grew a bit disillusioned with the promise of the technological utopia we were being sold. Painting became a reaction to that.
I believe that when you look at a painting, you’re looking for something for yourself, not for what the artist means. In that sense, art is always a mirror. The idea of “material purity” isn’t about being precious with materials; it’s about observing them. Material already carries its own history and weight, and so much can be evoked by the rawness of something. Whenever I overtly make a mark, the focus shifts to what I’m trying to depict, and suddenly my hand—and ego—are inserted into the work. I’d rather the emphasis rest on the properties of matter itself, the act of creation, and the experience of sharing space with something.
OJ: What inspires your work?
MS: Mostly, materials themselves. I’m interested in the dialogue that happens when you stand in front of an artwork—the conversation between the materials and how they behave, but also between the work and the viewer. I also often look to art history for inspiration, to try to reconsider ideas from the past in a contemporary context.
I’m also fascinated by how we now experience art—through screens, endlessly scrolling. It’s changed our sense of presence and scale, and that tension keeps feeding the work.
OJ: Your work dances around the relationship between physical and digital, the tangible and the virtual. Can you explain your interest in this symbiotic kinship and how your work reflects it?
MS: We live so much of our lives online now that even paintings have gone digital—we usually meet them on screens before we meet them in person. They start to lose their body, which, in a way, mirrors what’s happening to us. My work reacts to that by underscoring their physical presence—the edges, the structure, the surface, the scale, the lustre. I like the irony that people mostly view my works online, so even the JPGs become a necessary extension of the work—a kind of flattened chiaroscuro of the physical version.
OJ: How do you hope people engage with the subtleties of your work?
MS: I try to draw out a kind of natural lyricism that already exists within material—the subtleties are just an expression of that. Ultimately, I see the works as purely abstract: whatever ideas I’ve injected into them don’t necessarily matter as much as what it feels like to share a space with something, in the same moment.
I find some works funny, some sad, some boring—that’s all legitimate. It deeply interests me how the slightest shift can evoke something significant.
OJ: How does your work evolve the art landscape? Where does it sit as an art form (what denotes a painting?), and what does it articulate about the world today?
MS: I see my work as staying within the lineage of painting, but testing its limits. By separating and reconfiguring its components, I’m asking what still defines a painting—and whether it can reflect a world where bodies, images, and objects are increasingly untethered from physical space.
As for what denotes a painting—that’s really the question at the heart of it. I often return to Clement Greenberg’s idea of painting as an art that acknowledges and emphasises its essential properties: flatness, surface, and materiality.
OJ: What are you currently working on?
MS: It’s been a busy year. I’ve just come back from Barcelona, where my solo show Black Matter with Richeldis Fine Art has opened and runs until December. Alongside that, I’m preparing new work for Art Singapore with Curatorial+Co, which opens in January. For this, I’m developing an installation that reflects on the medium of sculpture itself—featuring one of my finest rocks yet, paired with an entirely new material I haven’t worked with before. Stay tuned.
You can find out more about Morgan Stokes on his website. Words by Tiffany Jade. Photography by Francisco Nogueira.
