Korynn Morrison
BIO
Korynn Morrison (b. 1991) is a contemporary Australian artist based on Dharawal Country (southern Sydney, New South Wales). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National Art School (2012) and has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across Australia and internationally. Her recent accolades include Winner of the 2026 Revival Emerging Art Prize, finalist selections in the 2026 Inside This Box Art Prize, 2025 St Columba's Art Prize and the prestigious 2025 Fisher's Ghost Art Award. Her process-led paintings are a tactile dance of control and surrender. Built in layers, sealed in ritual, and excavated with power tools to reveal a history of perfect imperfection. Through this performative act, she negotiates themes of memory, mortality, destruction and rebirth in response to the landscape and natural world around her. Morrison's work has been collected for private and corporate spaces across Australia and abroad, including major commissions and public-facing placements.
STATEMENT
The wild part of us is not something we need to find. It's something we've learned how to ignore. The edge we spend our lives smoothing over. The instinct buried under productivity. "There is something about the landscape that doesn't let you hide. It doesn't adjust itself for your comfort. It just continues. Nature doesn't fear its own power. It grows its capacity to hold it, and then births new life, time and time again. It floods to nourish, burns to renew, and exists in a relentless cycle of destruction and rebirth," says Morrison.
It is the tension held between such polarities that she seeks to capture in her Excavated Landscapes.
Some stories find us through the soles of our feet, rising up from the earth long before the mind has a chance to name them. Morrison's work draws on this same instinctual knowing, the pull of what the body senses before the mind understands. Colour, for Morrison, is a language that speaks in many volumes. By constructing her compositions from the bones up through colour blocking and strategic layering, she has developed a distinct methodology that brings depth and dimensional resonance to each work. Over time, each surface reaches a point of energetic tension before being sealed with a thick final coat, what Morrison refers to as a ritualistic burial.
"Each time I bury a painting, I receive a magical surge of childlike energy. The seemingly blank textured surface gives me permission to look at the painting with a fresh set of eyes."
As in nature, destruction becomes a necessary precursor to transformation. The excavation phase echoes the act of unearthing something long buried. Often unaware of what lies beneath, she re-curates each composition with power tools in hand, carving through layers of pigment to reveal the history embedded in each surface, imperfect, unpredictable, and alive. Each mark, scrape, and fragment becomes an embedded relic of the natural world. These surfaces act as maps of accumulated memory, revealing traces of time, tension, and transformation.
There is both a harshness and a gentleness in this work. A simplicity and complexity. A calm within the chaotic. Morrison's broader mission is to offer moments of stillness in a world that moves too fast, to create work that honours curiosity as a process of self-discovery. She invites viewers to slow down, to stand still, and to return time and time again for an intimate and gradual unfolding. Like the landscape itself, her paintings reward patience, reminding us that to truly see, we must first honour ourselves enough to pause.