Nikky Morgan-Smith: Index Act

Index Act considers drawing as an embodied practice connected to lived experience. Combining performance-based photography, mark-making and mixed media, Nikky Morgan-Smith presents a series of multi-layered compositions exploring linear time, memory, and physical existence.

Within each work, past and present intersect through photographic stills of the body in motion – capturing sensations and emotional states – and intuitive, gestural drawings that emerge in response. Together, they form a liminal third space, a threshold where image and mark, index and act, converge to reveal what is not immediately visible. In this in-between realm, the invisible histories of the body – its stored sensations, memories and energies – are made perceptible, emerging through the layering and interaction of forms.

Nikky Morgan-Smith, unmade bed, chiffon, digital print, acrylic paint, paper in recycled hardwood box, 2026 (detail), photo by Lisa Cross.