Josie Morway

The Risk of a Broader Conflict

2024

Josie Morway is a self-taught artist who has been painting most of her life. She is a painter and designer working in Providence, Rhode Island. She has shown her artwork widely, from the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts to the streets of Juarez, Mexico and Los Angeles. Her paintings are fragmented narratives, inspired by everyday words and phrases that bombard us - old signage, broken billboards, overheard conversations. Morway has been working steadily on a series of paintings about symbols that she considers relevant to both wildlife and civilization, titled Untame vs. The Domesticati. Morway’s statement, “I've been painting for most of my life, and this is what's been coming out of me lately. My paintings are often described as 'fragmented narratives'. I draw inspiration from the bits of word and phrase that bombard us daily in the form of faded ad murals, snippets of overheard conversation, the near-illegible promises of old signage. Stories are defined as much by the info they lack as by what they present. Using animals as the main characters in my narratives, I'm able to explore gestures, postures and expressions that are both familiar, universal and still sometimes as ambiguous as those partial verbal messages. For the last year or so I have been working steadily on a project I've titled Untame vs. The Domesticati, a series of paintings that examine the themes of domestication and wildness through symbols relevant to both wildlife and human society.”