An installation of seven small hexagonal rooms and 100 ceramic heads, each distinctly different from the next, by one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most inventive artists.

Modelled on a hat-maker’s block, each head is made distinctly different from the next by the addition of exaggerated features, peculiar appendages and uneasy textures. An excess of production, a riot of form, an assembly of strange types, Head[case] is a playfully surreal work. Bearing only a cursory relationship to the human head, we nevertheless can’t help but imagine Morison’s mutated heads coming alive, what strange new senses and ways of understanding the world they might reveal…

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Julia Morison was born in Pahiatua in 1952. She initially studied at the Wellington Polytechnic, graduating in 1972 with a diploma in graphic design, and went on to gain an honours degree from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1975. Since then, Morison has exhibited nationally and internationally and been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, including the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1989, and the prestigious New Zealand Moët & Chandon Fellowship in 1990, which allowed her to travel to France for a year's residency. She chose to make France her base for the following 10 years, returning to take up an appointment as senior lecturer of painting at the University of Canterbury. Morison became a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2005. In 2018 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM).