Morris pulls from a variety of painting languages and mixes them with her own personal landscape. This produces bold, captivatingly playful and sensory paintings that explore colour-form relationships.
Opposing narratives come together and inhabit her works; abstraction and figuration, intention and chance, the reductive nature of minimalist discourse and the all-immersive traces of abstract expressionists sit side by side. Her art plays on the tensions and boundaries that exist between these genres.
Colours clash and varying opacities layer enough to agitate the canvas surface and tempt you, the viewer, to look into the painting and construct your own associations.
The exhibition brings together a focused selection of paintings made over the last two years in which Morris has deconstructed painting and pushed the limits to explore how little needs to be in a painting for it to feel finished.
Coco graduated with a Fine Art degree from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2019. Two years prior, she was awarded the Painter-Stainers Scholarship and then the Chadwyck-Healey Prize for Painting in 2019. We visited Coco at her studio in South London and discussed her love of art, what drives her creativity and how she feels about her work.
We are so excited about your exhibition starting in May. Your work tends to blur genres, with each painting having its own personality. What ideas do you explore in your work?
Thank you! I explore colour-form relationships and the tensions and boundaries that exist between different painting languages and genres. This means that the subject matter, style of painting, materiality, point of inspiration and the process can be quite different between each painting.
Image by Kim Booker
Can you share an insight into your artistic process?
Well, I tend to plan out the larger paintings, [like those you will see in this show]. The composition comes from observational drawings that I obsessively redraw until the composition is reduced and abstracted. Sometimes the colours are based off other paintings or colour swatches I have collected. I begin the painting with washy layers of very bright, electric colour so the paintings have a backlit, glowing quality to them. Then I block in colour using uniform, repetitive marks and continue layering on different shades of a colour until the painting ‘clicks’ into place and feels finished.
I use my smaller works to trial new materials, colours, compositions, mark making and texture. I’ve found a certain freedom in making small works that has resulted in making a different series from my usual abstract paintings. I go in with no plans or expectations, I just put some marks, texture or colour on the surface and react to it, they are purely abstract and tend to be quite layered.
Abstraction and non-representational have opposing conceptions yet you are using both…
I allow for both, as I find that they feed into each other. I try not to put limitations on how I make paintings. When I commit to making a series I’m a bit more disciplined in what I allow to happen but I think there's room for both abstracted and the purely abstract within my work.
You have a strong relationship with colour. What moves you about how the colours interact on the surface?
Sometimes my colours are based on things like lipsticks, velvet and other fabrics. I want to recreate the colour but also the tactile sensations of the items. Or I might be trying to create a sense of light or temperature through the colour. I’m trying to create a sensation as much as a colour. I like how consuming colour is, and how it can change the way a room feels. And how tactile and physical colours can seem - certain colours look edible or velvety or matte. They can create illusions of depth and space. For me, framing the way I think about and make paintings, through the idea of colour, creates an endless amount of inspiration for painting.
The works in this show were made in the past two years. The titles feel much more emotionally charged than your earlier work (such as Magenta Haze in 2019) – why is this?
My earlier work was all planned out, I abstracted the forms from drawings, I had a vague idea of the colours I was aiming for and the types of marks/textures I would be using. Titling these paintings in a more process-based way that referenced the colours, forms and visuals seemed to make sense. In my more recent work, there's more pure abstraction. It all comes from me, the process feels more intimate. Titling them in a more emotive way compliments the process. I also think people find it easier to connect to abstract painting when the titles give a sort of emotional springboard into understanding or connecting with them.
Are there references that you consistently return to?
I have a lot of abstract motifs that reoccur in my work, like the frame/border and certain combinations of shapes. These come from abstracted drawings I made years ago. There are a couple of Rose Hilton paintings that I always seem to circle back to - ‘Blue Cafe, 2007' and ‘The Red Room, Woman Sleeping, 2010’. The soft edges, abstracted spaces and painting choices all balance figuration/abstraction and colour/form relationships so well.
If you could spend a day in the studio with any artist, past or present, who would it be?
I think my answer to this would change every month depending on what I'm doing in the studio. At the moment I'm thinking quite a lot about John Hoyland's paintings, so it would probably be him.
Which artists are you greatly influenced by?
I really love Bonnard and Vuillard. I constantly return to their paintings. Also Rose Hilton, Patrick Heron, Mark Rothko. And figurative artists like Michael Armitage and Antonia Showering.
Describe your interior studio space for us. Is there a piece of furniture or object in your studio that you love, that you feel particularly attached to?
My studio is messy! There are paintings in progress everywhere - on the floor, walls, the table, stacked up in corners and on shelves. I work on the walls, table and floor so they’re all covered in smudges of different colours of paint. Any furniture I have in the studio will at some point turn into a painting pallet. Lots of very used looking paintbrushes - the bristles have been completely worn down, cut up or matted. They each create their own type of mark. There is one clean wall where I stack all the larger finished work and a glass wall which looks out onto the larger communal area inside my studio building.
I have a special attachment to three paintbrushes in my studio, that were used to paint my degree show. The bristles were completely worn away through the process of making those paintings but I've never thrown them away.
What do you do first thing in the morning to get your day going?
I have tea every morning with Kim Booker, another artist in the same studio building as me. We generally talk about painting, what we’re working on, and look at art books and references. It's a nice way to get into the mood for painting.
As an artist, what actions do you take to try to minimise your impact on the environment?
I’m always trying to be more sustainable in my practice. I’m a typical artist so I hoard everything. For the most part, it all gets reused, repurposed, or recycled. I buy paint colours in larger quantities to minimise packaging and also use Sennelier Abstract paint - it uses very lightweight packaging. I re-stretch canvases a lot, so I don't tend to buy many canvas frames. On most days, I do other small things like walk to and from the studio, take in a homemade (plastic-free) lunch and keep the radiators off. Generally, the paint itself isn’t very environmentally friendly so I'm always trying to find more ways to be eco-conscious.
You can visit 'Through The Looking Glass' at Lorfords, 30 Long Street, Tetbury from Tuesday 3 May through Wednesday 1 June.