Morgan Stokes

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©2025  



Current

Where The Body Ends, R.M.Williams Residency, Sydney/Warrane, March-June 2025


Upcoming

Virgin, Oigåll Projects, Melbourne/Narrm, June 2025
Richeldis Fine Art, Barcelona, October-December 2025

2025



Where The Body Ends

R.M. Williams Residency
Sydney/Warrane, Australia

March-June 2025



Catalogue EssayMorgan Stokes’ R.M.Williams series, Where The Body Ends, delves into the material history of a storied Australian icon, reimagining the interplay of craft, material, and experience. This body of work is both a homage and a critique – a meditation on the tactility and cultural weight of the materials that shape objects and lives. Stokes’ practice, known for its interrogation of the medium of painting, extends here into a realm where questions of craftsmanship meets conceptual exploration. Referencing Josef Albers' Homage To The Square, Stokes transposes Albers’ chromatic studies into an exploration of material dialogue. Where Albers tested the perception of colour, Stokes shifts the inquiry to surfaces, textures, and the histories they carry.

The works in Where The Body Ends are formal studies in materiality, bridging the traditional components of painting – stretcher bars, cloth, and paint – with remnants of R.M.Williams’ legacy; discontinued lines of leather and suede salvaged from the company’s Adelaide factory. This fusion of artistic and artisanal materials interrogates notions of value and obsolescence, highlighting the liminal space between utility and aesthetics. The leather and suede, imbued with histories of labour and durability,are transformed into surfaces that are at once subdued and bold, rational and irrational, spontaneous and considered, their textures and tones pushing the viewer into an encounter with the unexpected.

Stokes emphasises texture as a point of tension within this body of work. The leather’s rugged tactility confronts the ghostliness of silk, while paint acts as both mediator and disruptor. Each work embodies a negotiation of boundaries – between body and material, utility and ornament, permanence and decay. Through this series, Stokes reframes the relationship between material and maker, history and presence. Where The Body Ends is not only a study of material histories but also a poetic inquiry into the limits and possibilities of matter itself, asking how the textures of our lived experience are woven into the things we leave behind.



Homage Painting (Leather & Silk), 110 x 90cm, 2025, silk organza, polyester, canvas, R.M. Williams leather.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas) (detail)




Homage Painting (Canvas), 58.5 x 48.5cm, 2025. 
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Homage Painting (Canvas) (detail)
Functional Painting, 150x118cm, 2025. 
Acrylic and pigment on stitched linen, canvas, hessian.
Functional Painting (detail)
Body/Space Painting 1 (detai)
Body/Space Painting 1 & 2, 33 x 27.5cm (each), 2025.
R.M. Williams leather, silk organza, Australian Pine, pastel and stain, polyester organza, Australian Pine.
Homage Painting (Silk & Canvas), 133 x 108cm, 2025.
Acrylic and pigment on canvas, silk organza
Homage Painting (Silk & Canvas) (detail)
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base (detail)
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
Limits Painting, 55 x 48.5cm, 2025.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, silk organza.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas), 58.5 x 48.5cm, 2025.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas) (detail)
Homage Painting (Leather & Silk), 110 x 90cm, 2025.
Silk organza, polyester, R.M. Williams leather.
Homage Painting (Leather & Silk) (detail)