Victoria Morton Hitting The Lift

There’s an all-over absorbency, as if all the bits and pieces of information that enter her body, from the internet to the state of the weather, to remembered glances at Quattrocento frescoes, to hearing artificial drumbeats, have been pushed through some fine, cerebral fabric onto the surface. – Joe Fyfe, Victoria Morton’s Plentitude, 2026.

As Fyfe alludes to in his newly commissioned text, a key aspect of Victoria Morton’s exhibition Hitting the Lift is the artist’s ability to draw apparently disparate elements together, allowing space for correspondences and associations across media. The presentation mixes paintings – some dense and busy with activity, others spare and focussed, holding or framing more singular gestures – with a listening zone where visitors can take in new music via tape decks and headphones.

Experimentation, accumulation and layering unite these musical and visual practices. Both are the result of accreted influences and their ambience is infused with the artist’s studio and its surrounds. The paintings come first, with the listening area located at the end of the gallery. They vary in size, density and format – some mimicking the vertical formats of East Asian ink wash paintings while others correspond more closely to the scale of Post-War abstraction. Many feature collaged items and studio objects, with dried oil paint, clothes pegs, sections of aluminium, or additional canvas populating their varied surfaces. They feel part of the world, rather than a window out of it. Letters are occasionally discernible too. Some have a hint of a Rorschach test, with silhouettes mirrored and pigmented areas soaking into the canvas and blooming.

The exhibition moves the viewer from silence to sound and back, with the tape cassettes allowing for the artist’s music to filter into the reception of the paintings, or perhaps to coexist with them. On one tape there are two dub versions of a track called Hitting the Lift, mixed by Luke Fowler. The title alludes to the goods lift that leads to Morton’s studio. The other tape features a track called Vita Minerals, also mixed by Fowler. The composition includes improvised instrumentation and various field recordings made in the same goods lift. The concertina doors become an industrial instrument, its noises occasionally mingling with natural sounds from the yard outside. Versions of both tracks feature on Morton’s Grow Easy Love LP, released under the moniker Onde de Bouche. Visitors can listen to this on a turntable located by the entrance, in the gallery’s bookshop.