Stephanie Lynn Morin is a Canadian-born artist, cultural researcher and educator based in Italy. Her work moves across artistic practice, visual culture and cultural analysis, treating art-making and scholarship as interconnected forms of enquiry. Central to both is an interest in the agency of the artwork: the capacity of an image, once made and encountered, to exceed the intentions of its maker and to enter into relations of its own with observers, contexts and histories.

Morin works primarily through abstraction. Her practice is grounded in the conviction that an artwork need not communicate a predetermined narrative in order to act upon the world. By resisting the prior imposition of psychology, politics or social prescription, abstraction can open a field of encounter in which meaning is neither delivered by the artist nor passively received by the viewer, but emerges through perception itself. In this sense, the artwork becomes an interlocutor rather than an illustration: something capable of provoking sensation, association and thought before these are stabilized as language.

For Morin, Art is less about political opposition than it is about art’s resistance to finitude: its capacity to exceed the conditions of its making, outlive its maker and continue acting through encounters yet to come.This understanding of artistic agency resonates with phenomenological accounts of perception, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to separate seeing from embodied experience, and with Jeroen Boomgaard’s attention to the artwork’s capacity to acquire trajectories beyond the circumstances of its production. Morin’s paintings explore this unstable space between object and observer, seeking not to define experience but to make the undefinable feel-able.

Her scholarly research develops from the same questions. She holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral research, Who’s Afraid of Transavanguardia? Reassembling Actor-Networks of Visual Art and Politics, Italy 1976–1986, examines the Italian Transavanguardia through the political, institutional and cultural relations that contributed to its emergence and legitimation. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, her research considers artworks not as isolated aesthetic objects but as actors within shifting networks of artists, critics, institutions, politics, markets and audiences.

Morin has exhibited her work in Italy and internationally and teaches visual art and visual culture alongside her continuing artistic and scholarly practice.

"L'œuvre d'art n'est pas un instrument de communication. L'œuvre d'art na rien à faire avec la communication. L'œuvre d'art ne contient strictement pas la moindre information. En revanche, en revanche il y a une affinité fondamentale entre l'œuvre d'art et l'acte de résistance."
Gilles Deleuze