Bio
Sean Patrick Morris is an accomplished visual artist with an interest in book illustration and graphics design. His work has been shown and sold locally and nationally and has been included in multiple Juried Exhibitions with both the Kingston Arts Council, Kingston School of Art, and the Modern Fuel Gallery. He primarily produces works in acrylics, ink, and water colour, but also enjoys experimenting with other media, notably sculpture, oil, gouache, and egg tempera. Thematically, his paintings often reflect his work in computing and explore technology’s intersection with humanity.
Sean currently resides with his family in Kingston, Ontario. He is proud to have been a member of the inaugural year of the Creative Arts Articulation Program at QECVI.
Artist's Statement
At heart I am an illustrator. Illustration means giving a subject faithful visible form, and I have done my best to so across very different subjects: botanical studies, urban landscapes, and figures. Chocolates and the saints of computing. New machines and old. Lately my subject has been the structures underneath machine intelligence: neural networks, support vector machines, embedding spaces, the unnamed gaps between words. These are real and consequential and have no natural image, which makes them exactly the kind of thing an illustrator wants to draw. The work runs in two directions. Sometimes I illustrate the concept, giving a digital idea concrete form as a painting or a sculpture. Other times I let the data make the form itself, so the object is not a picture of the data but the data embodied: a binary word carved in wood, a classifier's boundary built from painted spheres. I am drawn to liminal places, the borders where disciplines meet and the empty regions on the map where we have no language yet. The deserts in a vector space and the paintings I make from dreams turn out to be the same search: borderlands and what lies past the edges of the geographies we have charted. I work in ink, acrylic, watercolour, oil and egg tempera, and recently in wood, wire, and cement as I push my range. Whatever the medium, the making is the point and not the result. I am comfortable working alongside today's tools and yesterdays, without handing the brush to either, because the active verb, to draw, to paint, to build, is the whole purpose. The painting, as Klein said, is only the ashes of the art.
Recent Shows
- 2025 November — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2024 November — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2024 October — Kingston School of Art Juried Exhibition, Windows Art Gallery, 647 Princess Street, Kingston. Honourable Mention for “Meet Me Out By The Fire Escape (Deconstruction Time Again #1)”.
- 2023 December — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2023 October — Kingston School of Art Juried Exhibition, Windows Art Gallery, 647 Princess Street, Kingston.
- 2022 December — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2022 October — Kingston School of Art Juried Exhibition, Windows Art Gallery, 647 Princess Street, Kingston.
- 2021 December — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2019 December — Modern Fuel Gallery Re:Member show, Tett Centre, 370 King St West, Kingston.
- 2011 KAC Annual Juried Exhibition, Kingston Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston.
- 2010 KAC Annual Juried Exhibition, Kingston Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston.
- 2010 Modern Fuel Gallery Regional Juried Exhibition, 21A Queen Street, Kingston.
- 2009 Modern Fuel Gallery Regional Juried Exhibition, 21A Queen Street, Kingston.
- 2009 KAC Annual Juried Exhibition, Kingston Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston.
- 2008 KAC Annual Juried Exhibition, Kingston Public Library, 130 Johnson Street, Kingston.
- 2004 Modern Fuel Gallery Regional Juried Exhibition, 21A Queen Street, Kingston.
- 2003 Modern Fuel Gallery Regional Juried Exhibition, 21A Queen Street, Kingston.
Book Illustrations
- “Future Force, Concepts for Future Army Capabilities”, DLSC (Directorate Land Strategic Concepts), DND, 2003.
- “Towards the Brave New World: Canada’s Army in the 21st Century”, DLSC (Directorate Land Strategic Concepts), DND, 2003.
- Caverns of the Dead God, Matt Gullet, Longcon Press, 2023.