Victoria Morton 
Switch Track 

Switch Track is a survey show of selected works from 1995 – 2025. This period represents 30 years of painting since Victoria Morton graduated from the MFA course at The Glasgow School of Art in 1995. The exhibition carefully draws upon sketchbook materials, paintings and mixed media works from different points in time.  

Morton’s practice has encompassed painting, sculptural assemblages, photography, and sound. Her paintings vary in scale, opacity, colour and spatiality. Each distinctly painted composition has been developed with a degree of intricacy and intuition, exploring a continuously unfolding visual, spatial and psychological experience. She tends to install across a given space to orchestrate a ‘situation’ with the work, creating a journey or exploration for the viewer.  

Painting culture is at the centre of what she does, or conversely, she is centred in the collective and evolving human practice of painting. Her process includes research into both the medium or art form itself and its broader cultural contexts and content. The psychology of her work emerges from, and directs, her diverse engagement with materiality, technique, opticality, intuition, narrative, memory, iconography and abstraction. Also key are photography, music, the body, and the idea of thinking-painting – paintings as thinking objects.  

Destabilising the idea of linear narrative has been central to the development of her language. She evolves across canvases, an ongoing, unstable, open type of composition with several different possible resolutions that play with the idea of a narrative of sensations. Questioning and destabilising traditional cultural expectations would be at least as important as referencing and celebrating them. An important dimension of her practice is an investment in the history of women in art, though she does not explicitly ‘thematise’ this. With painting at the core of her practice, Morton’s work also considers expanded painting, both in sculpture and sound.