Making, Seeing, Hearing

To coincide with the final exhibition of our Artist Residency 2025 we will be hosting a day event with talks and workshops for practicing artists.

Our keynote speakers will be Donna Matthews, Isaiah Morris and Sunil Chandy, with workshops led by Michael Coppelov, Phil Elbourne and Kait Dron.

This will be a day of workshops and talks hosted by Morphe Arts, exploring how we learn, perceive and sense through making, hearing, speaking and moving: with attention to how faith is experienced through these activities.

NB - This will be our main Morphe event of the Autumn term, in a change to our usual Friday night events).

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(Title Image: Entropic Painting by Phil Elbourne, oil on panel)

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Schedule

10am: Doors Open

10.30-12.30: Talks and Panel Discussion with Donna Matthews, Isaiah Morris and Sunil Chandy.

Donna Matthews - The Significance of Gifted States in Artistic and Ecclesial Practice.

Sunil Chandy - Words made flesh: the shared corporeality of audible spoken voices and its theological implications.

Isaiah Morris - Pentecosting an Art-Practice: on the Spirit and Art-Making’s Liturgical End

12.10 - 12.30pm: Live Music, BELLS (aka Kandice Holmes)

12.30-2pm: Lunch (Bring Your Own)

2-3.30pm: Workshops

Phil Elbourne - Repackaging Printmaking

Kelly Frank - Taste of the Senses

3.30-4pm: Break

4-5.30pm: Workshops

Kait Dron - Moved By Gospel

Michael Coppelov - Learning From Corita

5.30-7pm: Closing of the Residency Exhibition, with Live Performance by Dohyun Baek

7pm: After hours (trip to the pub!)

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Donna Matthews is an improviser, artist, and worship leader. In the 1990s she wrote songs and played lead guitar in Elastica and later devised and facilitated creative workshops for people in recovery from addiction. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Music at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores poetic intuition, inspiration, improvisation, and speaking in tongues, looking at the intersections between gifted states, flow, attentiveness, and worship, and their significance in both artistic and ecclesial practice.

The Significance of Gifted States in Artistic and Ecclesial Practice - Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, and spiritual practice, Donna’s presentation explores the dynamics of flow—its benefits, outcomes, and transformative potential. She considers how improvisatory practices and speaking in tongues can open pathways into flow, and how such states can reshape artmaking into an act of worship, surrender, and service.

Sunil Chandy works across the domains of Theology, Art and Sound through creative practices and critical theory. He is currently a lecturer in Worship and the Creative Arts at London School of Theology. Chandy recently published Bible Noise: Reading Aloud, Listening Anew, a resource to creatively engage with the bible through sound

Words made flesh: the shared corporeality of audible spoken voices and its theological implications - A conversation is a sharing of oneself and others. Listening and speaking in their rudimentary forms are physical acts and they become a sharing of bodies. This corporeal sharing has implications that are theological and artistic. In this presentation, I suggest possibilities that arise for interactions of faith and creativity.

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Isaiah Morris is a new media artist and writer. With a Master’s in Christianity and the Arts from King’s College, London (Distinction). He researches Australian Pentecostalism, the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and projection and light-based art’s theological dimensions. Isaiah has exhibited artworks across Australia, Asia, and the UK, in galleries, shopping malls, music festivals, and churches.

Pentecosting an Art-Practice - explores the liturgical contours of art-making, in dialogue with the Pentecost event (Acts 2) and Catherine Pickstock’s work on language, meaning, and doxology. We’ll consider what it means to retrieve the liturgical end Modernity has supposedly stripped away, offering a few reflections on the Holy Spirit’s role in contemporary art-practice.

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BELLS led by multi-disciplinary artist Kandice Holmes will share a stripped back performance of her 'prophetic folk' storytelling, set to medieval, drone and psychedelic textures. The name is symbolic of a desire for her music to act as a clarion call, to speak truth to power, rally people together and raise up praise.

Kait Dron is a butoh performance artist whose practice integrates theology, landscape and dance. Viewing the body as poetic utterance and site of revelation, she explores movement as embodied epistemology, teaching immersive movement workshops for all abilities that draw on imagination, meditative states, and attentive dialogue with the living, sacred world.

Moved By Gospel - Kait will be facilitating an immersive contemplative movement workshop, suitable for all abilities, involving moving imaginatively in response to scripture. With guided exercises into the body followed by free movement, there is no choreography to follow, no right or wrong - just how the Gospel moves, surprises and changes us.

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Phil Elbourne is an artist and educator based in East London. In his practice, attention is offered to overlooked items, materials and experiences. In return, these peripheral objects open up a space to reflect on perception, materiality, and the shifting nature of meaning.

Repackaging Printmaking - Discover simple, approachable printmaking using the unexpected combination of recycled packaging and a pasta machine. We’ll playfully experiment with materials and techniques, and you’ll leave with your own postcard-size prints, plus the expertise to set up a small-scale intaglio practice at little to no cost.

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Michael Coppeelov lives and works in London. He studied Fine Art in Oxford and Glasgow and has studied painting at Turps Art School in London. He has spent time making art at the British School at Rome, the Cyprus College of Art and in Iceland. In 2023, he was a resident artist with Morphē Arts in London.

Learning From Corita - In this hands-on workshop, we'll dive into the iconic Sister Corita Kent’s joyful world of art-making inspired by her book Learning by Heart. We’ll draw, cut, collage, and even build mazes—experimenting, playing, and discovering new ways to see and create together.

Kelly Frank is a young British painter whose figurative paintings explore the themes of identity, memory, and relationships.

Feast of Senses - This workshop will explore drawing with our senses, swapping the forks and knives for graphite and charcoal. We will create our own plate of food by drawing with different senses. With the help of playful prompts and experiments, we will work with charcoal and graphite to create drawings through touch, sight, smell, and sound. This workshop is designed to help you uncover new ways of interpreting still-life drawings.

Morphē Arts is a network of artists across the UK, with projects in London, Wales and Scotland. Morphē supports early to mid-career arts professionals with a focus on encouraging critical engagement between Christian faith and contemporary art. As a charity we run gallery spaces, an artist residency programme, conferences, artists groups and monthly lectures. We have a wealth of resources for artists including online talks and printed publications. www.morphearts.org