Lily Morris
Lily Morris was born on Martha's Vineyard, MA, in 1987. Her work draws on a figurative background, shifting in recent years into new materialist thought: she collects natural materials and embeds them directly into the surface of the paintings, treating each as a charged material with its own lived history. Her ongoing series, Entanglement, is built like a knot. Nothing exists in isolation, and everything is held by what surrounds it. Snakeskin, clay, hornet's nest paper, and shells are pulled into compositions that behave like bodies, carrying motherhood, labor, and mortality inside the same surface. Morris holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2009) and an MFA from the University at Albany (2026). Her work has been shown at the MEAM Museum in Barcelona and is currently exhibited at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY. Her residency history includes the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, NY, and Red Gate in Beijing, China, with an upcoming residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She currently lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
Portfolio
Bulwark
This painting is based on a massive fresco painted at the palace of Versailles by François Lemoyne, depicting Hercules ascending into the...
Process for Bulwark
This video shows the process I used to create the painting Bulwark.
She was the weather
Six months of sleep. The queen hornet wakes alone each spring, the sole survivor of winter, and begins building the entire colony from...
She Was the Weather
This carousel shows clips of my process creating "She Was the Weather"
Knot
If you look closely, every small ribbon of grey in hornet's nest paper is a record of a body moving through space. The queen hornet begins...
Process video for Knot
Love before Language
I grew up on the beach, under the clay cliffs of Aquinnah, on Martha's Vineyard. Red, marbled, I worshipped at their altar. Love Before...
Process and context for Love Before Language
Cable
In this tree-sized textile column entitled Cable, my investigation of nylon weaves together into a dense herringbone of flesh-toned, torn...
Some process video for Cable
Infinite Coil
Infinite Coil is a painting inspired by a collage of receding ropes on a ship and hand-knit sweaters. Real rope is coiled and adhered to a...
Process and form of Infinite Coil
Point of Origin
Point of Origin is a physical embodiment of a vanishing point. I am drawn to what a vanishing point means as a structural tool. It is a...