Artist Interview: Conversation with Morgan Hogg

Morgan Hogg is a multidisciplinary artist and creative producer of Cook Island Māori (Ngāti Tāne), Tahitian and English descent. She is based on unceded Wangal and Dharug lands in Sydney. Working across installation and performance, Hogg’s practice explores cultural identity, displacement and intergenerational knowledge through the lens of her Kūki Airani heritage.

Silver tongues is an experimental moving image work that draws on the darker mythologies and storytelling of the Pacific. Through Cook Island Ura (a traditional dance), Hogg explores the role of the Momokē, the water people of the Avaiki (underworld), who lure the souls of those who are almost ready to leave the ‘enua (the land) and enter into the next life.

This interview between Morgan Hogg and Blair French, MAMA Chief Executive Officer, occurred in July 2026.

Your practice seems very focused upon representing and celebrating relationships. In Silver tongues this extends to bringing forth a spiritual storytelling that connects life and the afterlife. How does Silver tongues extend this wider practice exploring cultural storytelling from a Cook Island or Kūki Airani perspective in Australia?

In my practice I seek to produce new ways of storytelling for the next generation of ancestors. I extend the oral stories that I've heard growing up and from Cook Island and Moana communities whilst researching my practice, and visually translate them into works that transcend across our Moana diasporic communities. Silver tongues allowed me to visually extend the eeriness of Cook Island mythology and perform these moments that are often told to us by our elders. For me, it is important to continue my lineage and ancestral stories - from my language, land and people - however, also recognising from my diasporic experience that not everyone can speak Te reo, and having that universal connection of visual performance and familial images can ensure that our culture can continue in different ways.

What drew you to representing the world of the Momokē in this work?

In looking at how the ideas of the Momokē came about, I wanted to branch away from the light-hearted nature of Pacific mythology and look at some of the darker stories within the Pacific. The Momokē came from my research on the underworld goddess, Miru, I found them so interesting, they were almost like sirens but much more reserved. They only would go to the souls that had little life left to them and draw them into the sea to Miru. The story of Miru is that she would feed on the souls of the living to then provide sustenance to the earth to allow our 'enua (land) to grow. A dark cycle of life and death. I wanted to tell the story of the Momokē to really reflect on how both myself and the audience perceive that cycle, the dichotomy of the chaos and the quiet in these concepts.

You work across a range of media, but often with performance – live and/or in moving image form – at the heart of works. You have an incredibly strong presence as the central figure in Silver tongues. How important is this embodied experience in Silver tongues for you as the artist, storyteller and performer of Ura (traditional dance), and communicating that with audiences?

For me performance can be embodied in so many ways. A lot of the time within my installations, my fabric works are the performers and dance for me. I’ve always used my knowledge as a Cook Island dancer to guide the stories that have been passed down for so many generations and living within our systems and bodies. Silver tongues was probably a harder version of this for me and a new way of connecting to our stories and mythology. To embody a darker spirit, like the Momokē, and travelling to Piha in Aotearoa to film the work really allowed me to enter a space that holds the weight of some of our more complex histories that aren’t surfaced as much. I wanted the audience to feel the weight of the Momokē, to enter the space and be lured into the Moana. Performance is so important for me in being an accessible space of storytelling, through dance, sound and moving image, our stories can transcend across the Moana and into our diasporic communities.

Silver tongues is a stand-alone lens- and screen-based work. I enjoy the way in which you manipulate the work with image glitches, distortions and colour manipulations that give a sense of a space between this world and another, all intensified by a fabulous sound score, drawing attention to the materiality and capacity of the camera to be used to construct rather than merely record realities. As a technology, photography and moving image are deeply complicit in histories of colonial oppression. How are you looking to deploy the camera in relation to this history in Silver tongues or more broadly in your work?

Thank you so much! Yeah, the camera/image has such a complex connotation to Pacific history in particular. In looking at photography of Pacific women alone, there has been a longstanding colonial lens of the “Dusky Maiden”, the naive-belles-cum-femme fatales - also known as the Polynesian siren of postcards to welcome you to Tahiti, the hula girl on the dashboard of the car, the many images recreated from Gauguin’s paintings of young Tahitian girls. This history alone within photography has created such stigma of what a Pacific woman should look like with ongoing issues of colourism, fat-phobia and the perception of how we view Pacific women as “oriental objects”. In my works, I’m trying to take back how we view ourselves not only as Pacific women but as Pacific people. To me, being able to warp an image to enhance the story within Silver tongues is so important to place the character into its scene. I want the audience to be there with the Momokē on the beach, to be lured into the sounds of the Moana, to venture into the chaos of Miru. To recreate this into a digital form, allows me to have the freedom to warp these stories into my perspective of how I heard these stories. In regard to the rest of my work, it is to really show the audience that us as Pacific people are so much more than postcards, holiday destinations and historical artefacts - but as living ancestors that are continuing our culture in a time of Climate crisis.

Morgan Hogg is the recipient of the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship at the 2026 National Photography Prize.

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch