Morgan Sinton-Hewitt

The language of my work arises from my effort to seek, perceive, experience and act from the level of the essential: the realm of elemental interconnection or ‘oneness’ which runs through all life. 

Embodiment, a humanistic co-becoming both physical and non-physical, is my first realm of work. This is bottom-up and grass-roots, concerned with the transformative power in every day living, at home, and in community. It's about who I/we are becoming. My work is an effortful alchemy within this interconnected realm, embracing past-present and future. It is a profound and yet an ordinary dialogue which encounters and envelops across the apparent boarders or boundaries of self-other, in the day-to-day. 

This sensate life from every-day-ness informs the quality of my visual articulation. Language-carried-life through my body, and into oil colour, which is life. Colour is a form of light. I am a colourist. I also work with clay, and Earth-materials like silk, wood, water and weather. Through this, I co-become, create internal capacity and possibility. I then work to make tangible, the possibility within me, that for which I am becoming, and in creative coexistence-with. I acknowledge the significance (inherent dignity and function) of the human being within interconnected realms of self, society and land for creative-coexistence.  Working with these elements, through my own life, is like telling a story.

The unfolding story is one of revealing or ‘emerging’ from the unseen or unknown. Traces of my own grassroots becoming, which embody healing from the interconnected and pervasive harm of colonialism. My SGI Nichiren Budhdhist practice gives my work a non-dualist lens, one which is opening pathways of interconnection. As I seek the essential, to re-connect. I have recently been moving/thinking with the concept of ‘human flowers’ where everyone is unique and irreplaceable and of ‘emerging worlds’ which envision a realm of possibility.

South African born, Morgan lived as a child in Johannesburg, Brussels, England and Scotland. This had a profound impact on her and seeded the need to engage in the world as a Global Citizen. In 2003, Morgan gained entry to The Slade School of Fine Art, discontinuing in the first year due to illness, domestic violence, and then homelessness. She continued to paint. Her work embodies the autobiographical trace of interconnected healing. 

Morgan's 18 year-long arts education practice began in 2008 and includes engagement across broad media and groups. While co-creating with children living with disability, Morgan had an intuitive understanding of the transformative power of 'mirroring'. A return to study Psychology at Roehampton University (2012), brought Morgan up close with 'mirror neurone' theory (movement is investigated as the neurological underpinning of empathy) in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience. She gained a first class honours degree and the Martin Glachlan Prize for her integrative arts based thesis on the fluidity of identity formation in the everyday self. While studying, she met SGI Nichiren Buddhism (in 2014) with concepts of 'oneness of self and environment', and 'oneness of body and mind' already deep within this centuries old philosophy. The concurrence of encountering the same principles in religion and science struck a profound chord. Morgan was inspired to explore and blur boundaries of self-other in her own life, through dance, and through materiality of wood, water and found a rich source of healing potential.

Morgan started to seek a primordial experience of life and living, to create with and from; a phenomenal essence that is a language of connection - something that is at the essence or an elemental nature of all life, of earth, fire, water, air and space.  She explored multi-sensate material meanings through painting on silk (2017), finding new sensory-feeling with colour. Through every-day-life and rooted in her SGI Nichiren Buddhist Practice, in movement, and through colour, light in nature, Morgan sought primordial humanity and the elemental nature of all things. Sky, dust, light and sound in the co-becoming of all things, this became her single minded quest… There emerged an unfolding of embodied and ever-becoming experiential enquiry arising in effortful and mutually beneficial co-existence.

Her work then took on an urgency in the need to create a possible future for herself and her partner when they were diagnosed with cancer in 2018. Through this time, an 8 year companionship through cancer treatment, the work embodied their struggle to transform and see a way forward. This expanded, permeating all realms of Morgan's life and continues, and embraces her partner's death in 2025. This intimate experience of life and death has had a profound impact on her work. Morgan continues to embody for future-possibilities, her work grounded in her own body and interconnected process of co-becoming.