DRAW Space are delighted to present Nikky Morgan Smith / INDEX ACT, opening 6pm Thursday 17 July, 2025. The exhibition begins with a live performance drawing which unfolds over a two hour duration from 4pm in the gallery space. Curated by Melinda Hunt.
Nikky Morgan-Smith, Green Song, 30 x 70 cm
In INDEX ACT, Morgan-Smith will present a series of layered drawings that function as inventories of energy – the index and the act – both traces being held simultaneously together and apart by the tension and gravity of existing in parallel. The index and its original are impossible to disentangle.
Morgan-Smith’s works explore actualising energies as images, utilising the body as an archival site to channel and express energy. The works are made of two parts; the first is made by creating still images of studio-based performance – the performance is the act of recalling sensations, an idea or feeling. The second part are drawings made by responding to the still images, utilising gesture, direct and spontaneous. The two parts are then assembled to create an integrated whole from which a new spirit emerges, creating a third realm, a space in between.
INDEX ACT regards drawing as an embodied practice, bound to lived experience, re-connecting the mind and body. In these works I consider the body's capacity to translate and hold a message which is then translated back by the body through energy into a drawing, a continuing loop of energies.
Nikky Morgan-Smith
Download the room sheet as a pdf here.
Nikky Morgan-Smith, Bullet Proof, 30 x 70 cm
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Nikky Morgan-Smith, INDEX ACT
By Zali Matthews
It is generally accepted across disciplines that an “index” is an entity which points to something beyond itself, connected by some physical relationship, event, action or behaviour. Through its connection with this separate entity, the index inadvertently imposes its own meanings, values and associations, thereby underscoring its own presence and influence. In this continual feedback loop, meaning is shared and re-shared, expressed and perceived, digested and metabolised, and enacted and received.
Nikky Morgan-Smith, an artist based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, draws upon the index in her somatic, textural and porous series of works, assembled on show at DRAW Space for her solo exhibition INDEX ACT. Morgan-Smith presents a series of abstract, expressive drawings collaged with photographs depicting herself in stretched and contorted poses. Despite each work’s clear bifurcation between drawing and photograph, the line which separates them nevertheless blurs as forms dance across compositions and merge into one another in looping dialogues of shared tone, texture and form.
What came first: the chicken or the egg? For Morgan-Smith, the photograph comes first – or, more accurately, a sensation, emotion or energy which has germinated and sprouted from deep within her body, unbidden and unyielding. In the quiet isolation of her studio, Morgan-Smith exerts this energy into shape and movement, which she captures through the steady lens of the camera. Each act is thoughtfully considered and envisioned before being enacted. Aided by props such as a white translucent cheesecloth, a curved rubber tree branch, curling locks of dark hair, long black sleeves or a mouldy green-grey drop sheet strung up behind her, Morgan-Smith manipulates the lines and curves of her own body to create flowing lines and flat swathes of interlocking occupied and vacant spaces. By photographing her own body in motion, Morgan-Smith extracts singular slivers of temporal reality, and through the exertions captured within them, unveils indexed moments of felt emotion.
These slivers of temporal reality form the underlying structure for her responsive, gestural drawings, which together form collages in which “the mechanical and gesture meet”. With chalky, tactile mediums such as graphite, pastel, oil sticks and ink, Morgan-Smith draws tenuous, looping lines with wobbly and ragged edges; hard, flat dashes of graphite; deep, sweeping strokes of dark ink; and sticky, dabbed clusters of oil pastel. There is a quickness in her mark-making, one which betrays not a feeling of anxiety but rather a quiet intuition in response to the photographed forms and shapes made by her body. With every mark, faint yet traceable threads connect mechanical and gestural forms: a heavy stroke of graphite bears resemblance to the line made by an outstretched arm, while looping white lines of chalk evoke the drooping form of a translucent cheesecloth suspended between two forearms.
Morgan-Smith not only responds to the visual forms and shapes created by her body in each photograph, but also echoes and punctuates each expressed emotion or sensation held within them. In everything shower, short strokes of graphite splash across the paper like rivulets streaming from a showerhead; and broad, interlacing strokes of ink tangle across the paper in The shape of embrace like limbs linked and flush together. In this process of indexical mark-making, each bodily gesture is seen, experienced anew, and then re-expressed quickly and intuitively through her drawn, suggestive forms.
This inherently porous and responsive dialogue between bodily gestures both past and future creates layers of indexicality to emotions and sensations. They surge and bleed between past and present, limb and line, shape and smudge, in a complex, interlinked loop of energies. Morgan-Smith has said that “my gesture is driven by energy, or the rhythm of a feeling in my body.” Indeed, many of her gestures are driven not only by an undercurrent of energy but also by a strong rhythm which emphasises flowing lines and soft curves, drawn in melodic ebbs and flows. This musical component to her practice is acknowledged through the titles of several works such as The leaf has a song and Green song, where this rhythm is connected with a sense of connection and shared dialogue with the natural world.
This degree of receptiveness in Morgan-Smith’s practice unveils a deep interest in the field of somaesthetics. Proposed by American philosopher Richard Shusterman in critique of traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism, somaesthetics foregrounds the role of the living body as a site of sensory appreciation and blurs hierarchical distinctions between mind and body, reconceptualising them as one interconnected system. For Morgan-Smith, it forms the basis of much of her practice, in which energies are borne from and received by an interconnected mind-body system that she indexes with each drawn gesture.
Somaesthetics also enables Morgan-Smith to construct a framework through which she may reflect on her own experiences of living and being in the world. In her recent Masters thesis entitled Sensitive Dependence, Morgan-Smith chronicles her first childhood recollections of experiencing “big energy”, manifested as nervousness or anxiety. At times this energy would seep out from her body, her left wrist occasionally ‘crying’ during times of stress, or horses going skittish while she rode them. Morgan-Smith also describes periodic states of hyper-empathy in which she would find herself intensely affected by the strong emotions of others to the point where they felt like her own. Part of her artistic practice functions as a means of exploring this high emotional porosity and sensitivity, both within herself and in relationship with others around her.
Like the mouldy drop sheet – spotted and textured, like skin – that forms an index to the humid air of the Northern Rivers, Morgan-Smith’s drawn gestures each form an index to her felt emotions, sensations and energies, borne from her body’s porous and sensitive relationships with itself and with the natural lifeforms and inanimate objects that surround her. Energies bleed, leak, seep and spread, and are each captured and indexed by Morgan-Smith in delicately drawn and painted gestures.
© Zali Matthews 2025
BIOGRAPHY
Nikky Morgan-Smith is an artist based on the mid-north coast of NSW on Gumbaynggirr country.
Morgan-Smith’s practice anchors itself in explorative and expanded drawing. Her work investigates the mind-body problem through somaesthetic’s. Employing gestural drawing and bodily imagery, Morgan-Smith constructs layered collage and drawing based assemblage works.
Morgan-Smith received BFA from RMIT in 2004 and an MFA from The National Art School in 2024.
Morgan-Smith has exhibited consistently for the last twenty years throughout Australia and in Europe, her work is represented in public and private collections in Australia and Europe.
Morgan-Smith has been a finalist in numerous art prizes, Most recently the Muswellbrook art prize 2024, 2025. the Ravenswood woman’s Art Prize 2023. JADA Drawing Prize 2018, 2024. RMIT Women Researchers Network Prize 2023, Olive Cotton Award 2023, Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize 2023 and The National Still Life Award2 2021.
Morgan-Smith has been awarded various artist in residence programs, notably the Suzanne Bastian Foundation in Vanuatu.
Download the exhibition essay as a pdf.
Nikky Morgan-Smith, Inhabited Drawing, 30 x 70 cm