Morgan O’Connell (b. 1995, Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work explores her ever-evolving relationship with nature through the lens of water’s distortions, ecological complexities, and shifting boundaries between the visible and obscured. She is drawn to water’s many contradictions— how it heals and harms, holds boundaries and dissolves them, clarifies and obscures. Her years studying environmental processes at Lafayette College and working inside the energy industry have put her in unsettling intimacy with the very systems she feels complicit in destroying. That tension floats unresolved in her work, as she paints from just below the ocean’s surface, where the threshold between air and water distorts everything around it—where sky becomes liquid and form surrenders its edges. This space envelops the viewer in ecological grief and disorienting culpability while occasionally opening into clarity.
Morgan builds paintings in layered water-mixable oils on biomorphically shaped panels — some circular, some with undulating edges. The object itself resists stillness. These odes to ripples, warped reflections, and refracted light allow her to linger along water’s surface, suspended in what she cannot fully see and what she cannot look away from.
She is currently pursuing her MFA at Pratt Institute where she was awarded a Graduate Merit Scholarship. O’Connell is the recipient of the Vivian B. Noblett Prize, and her work has been featured in multiple publications. Her paintings have been exhibited and collected by businesses, nonprofits, and institutions, including the Nurture Nature Center and Lafayette College’s Rockwell Integrated Science Center. She has completed commissioned works for office spaces and public venues across Massachusetts, with earlier projects installed at The Range Bar & Grille, Barrel House Z, and Milton Academy. O’Connell’s exhibition history includes group shows in Brooklyn and New York City and a solo exhibition at the Nurture Nature Center.
