LOCKY MORRIS

“An Artists Presence” A permanent collection exhibition 17 May - 14 September 2025. National Gallery of Ireland | Print Gallery | Admission free. It includes this work  ‘La Tête Disparaît’ (LED lightbox, Duratran) which holds an image taken on a phone in Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry City in 2019.

An exhibition exploring how artists, consciously or unconsciously, have placed themselves in their work through drawings and paintings from the National Gallery of Irelands permanent collection. Spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Featuring self-portraits, depictions of artists in the act of making, and works that emphasise the stylistic signature of their creator, this exhibition offers a fascinating insight into the artistic process. This exhibition invites visitors to consider the relationship between the artist, their art, their presence, and the viewer. 

https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/exhibitions/artists-presence

Last chance for a dark wash is a new site-specific exhibition by Locky Morris that features collaborations with artist Jaki Irvine. The exhibition reflects the artist’s current practice and process, with elements drawn from the video project residency at the Regional Cultural Centre (2021 – 22).

Over the last two decades, Morris has adopted a daily routine of walking and wandering, probing at the edges of the city and coastline. Gleaning his material from liminal spaces, we are invited to look differently, beyond the actuality of what we might see and perhaps consider the sublime in the most ordinary.

The exhibition includes an installation of found-sculptural assemblages, video and photographic work. The artistic approach, mostly improvisational as witnessed on his Instagram feed, is situated between a certain order and spontaneous energy. Playful, succinct and often discordant, the work suggests another way of looking and interacting with the world, while questioning notions of intrinsic value.

Locky Morris was born in Derry City where he continues to live and work. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in Northern Ireland – most notably from a socially embedded perspective – he has gone on to develop another working vocabulary that moves fluidly between the personal, public and political. While still informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape, this work extends across photography, video, gallery installation and incorporates the social media platform Instagram.

Morris’ practice, born in part out of a fascination for what confronts him in the often chaotic details of the everyday, is rich, inventive and marked by a visual playfulness that feels distinctly his own. Running parallel to this have been numerous large-scale works and interventions in the public realm. The work has also been influenced by his active musicianship.

30 Sept - 11 Nov 2023

Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland 

Exhibition curated by Rachel Botha.

https://regionalculturalcentre.com/exhibitions/darkwash/

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

12 April 2023

Dublin Sound Lab presents a programme of Irish premiers, including three new works written especially for this performance by Francis Heery, Jaki Irvine and Alessandro Massobrio’s new Music Current Festival commission...Jaki Irvine’s Re_sett_ing_s (for mixed chamber ensemble and live video/VJ) is quite literally a resetting of her recent two-person show of the same name, with Locky Morris at The Complex, Dublin. The artist John Graham described that exhibition as, “a panoply of looping images and sounds; a discursive array of interacting elements that, while tightly constructed, feels enjoyably lawless.” Here the work is literally reset, amplified and projected with the forces of flute, violin, piano and drum kit, and revels in its self confidence and tightly controlled lawlessness.

“Dublin Sound Lab is doing an important job for those in Ireland who remain passionate about music in the post-war avant-garde lineage and who rarely get the opportunity to hear such ‘difficult’ music performed… …flying the flag in Ireland over the past decade for European modernism.” [Liam Cagney, Journal of Music]

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/555631711/coast_to_coast-PUBLISHED.pdf

Michelle Malone, Locky Morris, and Laura Quinn announced as recipients of the 2022 Golden Fleece Award at the opening of The Golden Fleece Award: 21 years exhibition at Solstice Arts Centre. https://www.goldenfleeceaward.com/news/winners-of-the-2022-golden-fleece-award-announced

The Irish singer-songwriter's track about exile and shifting dimensions is accompanied with visual artist Locky Morris's meditative footage of intertidal mudflats https://www.thewire.co.uk/video/cathal-coughlan-unrealtime