#21

There exists a moment when the contours of the Earth's terrain tense with memory. When prey locks eyes with predator. In that instant, time suspends. The chase hasn’t begun, but the outcome is already written into the bones of the land. A ridge arches like the curve of a shoulder blade, a stream coils like a tendon drawn tight, and the skin of the world braces itself - poised in the stillness before motion, the silence before instinct takes hold.

Angels & Killers captures this moment through 133 topographic artworks reimaginedas beings. Some are recognisable, others spectral - their balance of abstraction and figuration representing the tension between natural choreographies: hunter and hunted, vulnerability and instinct, evolution and extinction, beauty and threat. In this body of work, life emerges from the Earth itself - inseparable from the terrain that forms it. The animal kingdom surfaces not as a subject placed upon the environment but grown from it, etched in salt flats, threaded through river basins, born from the contours of deserts, forests, and coasts. Each composition is a memory that the planet carries in its primitive skin, an observation of nature and the fragile equilibrium that governs life and death.

The body of work is not a moral contemplation. It does not ask us to choose sides. Instead, it illuminates a system that precedes and ignores moral binaries. Predator and prey are codependent roles in nature’s endless feedback loop. One cannot exist without the other. “Angels” are not symbols of purity - they deceive, adapt, protect; camouflage artists guided by impulse. “Killers” are not monsters - they are hunger given form, driven by necessity and habit, performing the ancient rituals that keep the balance alive. These works embody the alignment of such contradictory lenses – a proposition that there is no innocence in this kingdom, only the instinct to endure.

A new AI model was trained from a selection of Morris's animal photos – both living and taxidermy – from a decade of visits to zoos, museums and wildlife moments from her travels. Newly generated images from this model are then guided further with prompting to create the basis for each piece that then receives a combination of additional AI treatments that reinterpret intentional glitches into textures of landscapes.

—