Victoria Morton’s practice has encompassed painting, sculptural assemblages, found objects, photography, and sound. Her recent paintings vary in scale, opacity, colour and spatiality, each distinctly painted composition has been developed with a degree of intricacy and intuition. Influenced by musical composition, colour perception, and everyday life, alongside personal narratives, historical and cultural references, Morton’s works explore a continuously unfolding visual, spatial and psychological experience. Within her paintings she re-evaluates the complexity of visual representation and physical experience through a combination of layering, fragmentation and movement. Each painting works through the mental exercise of creating, disrupting, reforming and extending compositions. This technique builds a sense of time into her work.
Morton’s exhibition at Aird’s Lane focuses entirely on painting. Presenting a cycle of five large-scale oil paintings which specifically respond to the space in terms of their size and installation, offering a site for reflection. Each painting forms a narrative with the next. These works softly draw upon issues of health, the science of optics and light, and the idea of ‘free will’, as well as notions of representation. With washes of colour and variation in tone, line and brush stroke, individual paintings present a range of different attitudes and intensities within the framework of the installation. Luminous thin layers of paint draw you in, while concentrated, spontaneous compositions require you to step back. Morton’s areas of interest are explored through the filter of her daily life and rely on both photography and impulse. In each painting and through the arrangement of the five works, she has created an expansive space for the viewer to inhabit allowing us to engage with the non-verbal, expressive qualities of painting on a level which is led by the act and process of painting itself.
Victoria Morton (b. 1971, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow and Fossombrone, Italy. Morton studied at the The Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Painting in 1993, and with an MFA in 1995. Morton exhibits internationally, selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Mouth Wave’ Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Il Capricorno, Venice (2012); ‘Tapestry (RADIO ON)’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012); ‘Her Guitars’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2011); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2010); ‘ba Ba ba’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2008); Sun By Ear’ (with Katy Dove), Tramway, Glasgow (2007); and ‘Plus and Minus’, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2002). Group exhibitions include: ‘GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2014); ‘A Picture Show’, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2013); ‘Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow Since WWII’, Mackintosh Museum, The Glasgow School of Art (2012); ‘Edge of the Real’, The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004); ‘Painting Not Painting’, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2003); and ‘Matisse and Beyond’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2003).
