Make Good: Morphe National Conference

Join us for our yearly Morphe conference, this year held in London.

A day of workshops, talks and seminars reflecting on community and sustaining an arts practice. More details to come.

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Confirmed speakers:

Dr Funmi Adewole (Performer, Educator and Dramaturge)

Kieran Dodds (Non-fiction Photographer)

Julia Lucero (Associate Director at Nahmad Projects, London)

Workshops:

Ruth Smith (Director of Ruth Smith Gallery, Devon)

Lydia Oak (Director of Shieldfield Art Works, Newcastle)

Performance:

BELLS (Kandice Holmes)

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(This event will replace the London gatherings' Friday night events this term)

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We want to make this event as accessible as possible, and to pay our contributors fairly, but we are also a small charity who rely on donations and funding. We have estimated that it will cost approximately £40 per person to run this event.

We are however choosing to run the event on a donations basis, and encourage those who are able to give more to do so, and those who are not, to give what they can.

Lunch is provided with the ticket doonation.

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Order of the Day

Morning: Talks

Lunch: Provided

Afternoon: Workshops

Evening: Performances

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TALKS

Dr Funmi Adewole Elliott

The Arts as a Vocation: Sustaining a Lifelong Arts Practice

If you feel called to the arts, you may understand your work as a vocation before a profession. A vocation is what you feel called to do, not simply how you earn a living. This raises important questions: what does an artistic vocation mean for livelihood, relationships with friends and family, and financial stability? How we understand an artistic vocation shapes how we engage with work, money, and community. In this talk I discuss the insights I have had gained through scripture and experience about calling, faithfulness, and sustaining an arts practice over a lifetime.

Funmi Adewole Elliott is a performer-writer. After moving from Nigeria to Britain in 1994, she toured for several years with African dance drama and Physical theatre companies whilst working as an arts consultant and as a dance advocate writing about and leading projects supporting Black dance. She lectured at De Montfort University, Leicester, for eight years before returning to full-time independent practice in 2025. FAEStudios is the platform for her work in arts consultancy, dramaturgy, pedagogy, and performance

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Kieran Dodds

Photoalchemy: the art of turning light into gold

A sustainable artistic practice requires deep creative and spiritual resources. It also requires cold hard cash. This talk will discuss the perennial challenges and offer some solutions to hep you live the life artistic, learned from two decades of professional experience.

Kieran Dodds is an award-winning Scottish artist, writer and speaker. Published in The New York Times, Nature, Geo France and Der Spiegel, his work is held in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Scotland. Dodds’ research-driven projects are centred on the interplay of environment and human culture; how people shape their environments and how those environments in turn shape people.

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Julia Lucero

Curating your career: applying gallery strategy to your own practice & how community actually sells work

The art gallery has too often been confused for an impenetrable, temple-like space that holds the keys to creative visibility and success. For ten years, I've worked with people from top to bottom. It isn't as glamorous as it looks, and most importantly, it doesn’t need to be lonely.

I'll share how curatorial thinking can help artists manage their own careers, reframing 'selling yourself' as thoughtful stewardship rather than compromising integrity. And, how networks and relationships are what actually move careers forward. Collectors buy through trust, not just talent. Artist communities create opportunities that no amount of studio isolation can.

Julia Lucero is Associate Director at Nahmad Projects in London, where she has led the research, curation and delivery of the gallery’s public exhibitions programme since 2016. With a decade of experience in the contemporary art world, her expertise spans curatorial practice, collection management, and art programme development with a particular focus on building dialogues across contemporary artists and modern masters.

WORKSHOPS

Funmi Adewole Elliott: Meditation into Movement

This creative workshop combines scripture reading, and movement as reflective practices. Participants are invited to bring a short paragraph about an issue they wish to shift their perspective on, which will form the starting point for creative dance and movement.

Through scripture, we will explore fresh ways of seeing these concerns and translate them into accessible movement sequences. The session includes a warm-up and simple dance vocabulary suitable for all levels. Meditative movement will be both gentle and dynamic, with upbeat music supporting an embodied, reflective experience.

Kieran Dodds: How to Fail Successfully

A session to dream big and embrace failure as a powerful creative engine. An honest talk with practical examples of things that worked, others that have not and reasons why. Set new goals and prepare to fail boldly!

Lydia Oak: Social Practice

‘Sustainability’ and ‘Community’ are pretty loaded words with different baggage and different meanings depending on the context. So what does the word ‘sustainability’ mean when placed in the context of working long term as an artist or art organisation in a specific community? What even is Socially Engaged Practice and how does it fit into this? What is the difference between parachuting in and being rooted within a community? How do we call for communities not commodities? What is a complicated portrait of place and how do communities tell their own stories? Are artists now also providing social services? What is asset mapping? And how does agency and empowerment come into all of this?

Lydia Oak's artistic activities explore embodied hospitality. She creates spaces and hosts events that enable conversations about hospitality. Lydia is also Director of Shieldfield Art Works (SAW) in Shieldfield (Newcastle), a project of the Methodist Church seeking the good of the city through creative practice and operating on the intersection of contemporary art, theological reflection and community activism. Check out www.saw-newcastle.org for more info. Lydia facilitated the collaborative co-creation of the SAW community garden; she practices printmaking and drawing; is writing a collaborative musical album called ‘The Arboretum’; and last year made her own wedding dress.

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Ruth Helen Smith is an artist based in Devon where she runs a gallery, an art residency programme, and teaches. Her paintings are loose abstractions painted en plein air and centre around the miracle of existence. Ruth began with an art historical background studying her BA and MA at The Courtauld Institute of Art, before training in painting at Heatherley’s. One of her most recent projects has been setting up an artist collective called Red Mud Arts, which has been bringing over 100 artists together through several monthly groups, to collaborate, critique and support.

PERFORMANCE

BELLS led by multi-disciplinary artist Kandice Holmes will share a stripped back performance of her 'prophetic folk' storytelling, set to medieval, drone and psychedelic textures. The name is symbolic of a desire for her music to act as a clarion call, to speak truth to power, rally people together and raise up praise.

Funmi Adewole Elliott: New Season. In this structured improvised dance piece, Funmi uses words and movement to explore the process of embracing a new season of life.

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Morphē Arts is a network of artists across the UK, with projects in London, Wales and Scotland. Morphē supports early to mid-career arts professionals with a focus on encouraging critical engagement between Christian faith and contemporary art. As a charity we run gallery spaces, an artist residency programme, conferences, artists groups and monthly lectures. We have a wealth of resources for artists including online talks and printed publications. www.morphearts.org