Best in show | Pink Spread, 1986, by Mali Morris

“This exhibition is a ‘homecoming’ for Mali Morris, who first came to Newcastle University in 1963 for the fine art department’s ‘first year basic course’, led by the artist Richard Hamilton.

It features a selection of the vibrantly colourful and luminous work produced over the past 45 years by Morris, who is approaching her 80th birthday.

Before taking to painting, Morris was interested in photography – a very different medium to the one she’s now known for – and produced photographs of people walking across large open areas, as well as the spaces within old master paintings.

These ‘spaces in between’ were concerns she addressed in a different language in later paintings, which were very much within the tradition of the abstract expressionism of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

This picture is from a group of works that was based on the motif of a diamond. Morris would have worked in an improvisational manner on the floor with an unstretched canvas tacked to a board; how the motif would appear in the picture was open to chance.

She would crop the finished work to find the most resonant or effective image within it – a technique that was important to artists at the time.

Some performed it in an extreme way by producing absolutely enormous scrolls of canvas from which they would select tiny sections that they thought worked.

Morris, on the other hand, always had an idea of the motif in her head when she was working, while still remaining open to the possibilities of improvisation and chance.

She usually formed those motifs from the inside out, being more interested in finding the edges of the diamond shape by working on an area of colour, rather than predetermining a position on the canvas.

This painting reflects the influence of US abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, who was known for her technique of staining a canvas with liquid colours to produce wonderful, translucent effects strongly resembling watercolours.

It points towards how Morris’s work developed, with its other-worldly sense of colour existing in an indeterminate space.

She changed tack in the late 1990s to produce a series called Clearings, in which she laid down geometric sheets of colour on top of one another, before clearing away one layer to reveal another.

Morris’s paintings are an arena in which light, space and colour interact, so a gallery of her work becomes a giant version of that.

I think she wants you to experience a sense of buoyancy, openness and lightness. She wants you to feel uplifted.”

Interview by John Holt. Mali Morris: Returning is at the Hatton Gallery 14 September 2024-11 January 2025

Sam Cornish co-curated Mali Morris: Returning at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, and is author of Mali Morris: Painting, published by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019