All photography by Ben Thomson for The Creators Project
Sean Morris draws retro-inspired femme fatales wearing bikinis and wielding chainsaws, surrounded by scorpions, snakes, and crocodiles. The neat, orderly lines of his illustrations contrast with their twisted kitsch subject matter, and perhaps it’s that contradiction which makes them so compelling.Showing The Creators Project around Black Lake, the group studio space he runs and shares with ten other Melbourne artists, Morris explains that he has an ongoing obsession with outsider subcultures. “Stories of groups who thrive living outside the bounds of normal society.”
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“I have this fascination with the 1970s I can't shake,” he says. “Or at least, a fascination with the aesthetic fossils of that time…I never really draw modern technology or fashion, so i focus on this era before the world started to really slide into the internet-phone pit.”
Originally from Perth, Morris says that becoming an artist never really seemed like a decision. He didn’t even go to art school—just continued making things until the prints began to sell, moving to the Eastern states a couple of years ago. “It was a very long process of working out that it was possible to be an artist in the job sense. I'm crazy lucky and grateful that I get to do this full time.”
Morris’s illustrations have been printed on riso, featured in zines, and painted on the walls of galleries and night clubs. He’s even collaborated on murals with the likes of Ghostpatrol and Georgia Hill. “I'm pretty digital these days,” he says. “I use a Cintiq and it's faster than I've ever been with a pencil and pen. But I do love painting walls with just a big brush and one or two tins of paint. I'd like to keep doing that as much as possible.”
Morris also runs a curatorial project, Black Canyon, with Tom Groves. They’re responsible for shows in Perth, London and Melbourne, and recently guest curated the tenth issue of Kingbrown Magazine.
There are plenty of future projects in the works; he artist reels off a long list of future plans like they’re no big deal. “I'm heading to Japan in a couple of weeks with Maddy Young, Georgia Hill and James Jirat Patradoon to eat some food and paint some walls,” he says. “Then in September I'll be in the US for a big group art show i've been organising with my buddy Michael Hsiung, at Superchief Gallery in LA.”
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