Connecting culture and creativity

Emerging artist, Morgan Hogg, had a bumper year in 2021. As well as receiving the 2021 Jerome de Costa Memorial Award, she held her first solo exhibition at First Draft Gallery in Wolloomooloo and had the first half of her new work Ariki Vaine streamed as part of the Liveworks Festival at Performance Space.

Morgan’s artwork considers ongoing issues within Pacific islands and Indigenous cultures from the perspective of her Indigenous Cook Island and Anglo-Saxon heritage. Her exhibition at First Draft, titled Enua Mānea, meaning ‘Beautiful Land’ was an immersive interactive installation, reflecting upon the current state of climate change within the Pacific Islands. She earned the opportunity to exhibit the work after entering a competition with a video project she made in class. 

The $2000 Jerome de Costa Memorial Award is designed to support students enrolled in the Sydney College of the Arts with the cost of art materials and books. Winning the award not only brought her immense relief, it provided more freedom and more choice. 

She would encourage prospective students to look at all the financial support available from the University. “I think the best thing to do during your time in University is to apply for all the scholarships/grants/bursaries you can,” she says, “to make your life a little easier during uni.”

This generous gift, established by the de Costa family in 1987 in memory of Jerome de Costa (1969-1986), honours the young artist’s talent and ambition. Jerome was passionate about art, design and fashion, making his own clothes and keeping notebooks full of sketches and ideas. His dream, to enrol in Sydney College of the Arts after high school, was tragically prevented by his untimely death.

For over 30 years now, the de Costa family’s gift has supported and encouraged emerging artists. Some, like TV Moore (who won the Jerome de Costa Memorial Award in 1996), have gone on to have hugely successful careers. Moore, now based in New York, works across a range of media, including video, painting, sculpture, installation and photography and has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally.

Morgan, has a word of thanks for the family, “Thank you for providing a safe space and funds for visual artists. It’s hard to find time to practice art and work enough to fund your artwork, and it has been a blessing that you provided freedom to my work

Like her peers at Sydney College of the Arts, Morgan has enjoyed the close community of the studios, “working collaboratively and bouncing ideas off each other.” She acknowledges the skilled technicians too, “they have also been amazing to us, providing so much assistance and care for our works throughout my whole course.”

Her graduation work, Ariki Vaine, is a video installation which “engages with the disconnection of being biracial, and the importance of connecting with our heritage to understand self.”

When it was streamed as part of the Liveworks Festival, Morgan was able to have “really constructive conversations with curator Nisha Madhan about the conceptual construct of the work and ancestry ties toward it.”

Morgan has recently completed her Honours year as part of her Bachelor of Visual Arts and Bachelor of Advanced Studies and developing a whole new project. We look forward to seeing where this young artist’s career takes her.