Kent Morris

Born: 1964 Melbourne, Victoria. Lives and works Melbourne, Victoria. Barkindji people.

A Barkindji man living on Yaluk-ut Weelam Country in Melbourne, Kent Morris graduated from Monash University and the Victorian College of the Arts and is an alumnus of the National Gallery of Australia’s Wesfarmers Indigenous Leadership Program. He also leads The Torch, a not for profit community arts organisation that provides art, cultural and arts vocational support to Indigenous offenders and ex-offenders in Victoria through a program he designed and developed in 2011.

The intertwining of Aboriginal cultural knowledge systems, technology and the built environment is an important and integral element to Kent’s works. Morris' artworks reveal the continuing presence of First Nations knowledge, history and culture in the contemporary Australian landscape despite ongoing colonial interventions by re-imagining and reconstructing the built environment to reflect Indigenous systems of knowledge and design.

Kent has exhibited widely throughout Australia and has worked on large scale architectural commissions for the UTS College, Sydney, and Australian Unity, Melbourne. He has also completed public works including billboard projects for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in 2020, and the Incinerator Gallery in 2019. In 2019 Kent exhibited his Unvanished series and completed a artist residency at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville USA.

Boyd’s works are held in national and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National History Museum, London, and most Australian state and territory galleries. He exhibited in the 56th Venice Biennale, received the Bulgari Art Award (2014) and completed commissions for the Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2018) and the MCA, Sydney (2014).