Edinburgh-based Irish photographer and writer Miriam Morris will exhibit a new collection of work at the Hox Gallery at the city’s Hoxton Hotel.
composed of nows takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Forever is composed of Nows’, in which Dickinson suggests that eternity is made from the accumulation of the present – each fleeting ‘now’ becoming part of something continuous and immeasurable.
For her photographs, Morris has drawn on this and the Celtic concepts of hiraeth, síreacht and cianalas, reflecting a longing or ache for a time or place that can no longer be returned to – or perhaps never truly existed – yet each of them are captured in a transient state of ‘now’.
Comprising candid and staged imagery, the work moves between memory and imagination, evoking grief, longing and displacement – the emotive nostalgia often experienced during half-sleep, and captured in the quiet melancholy of early mornings, or the evening gloaming, with each work thus acting as a dream-state vignette. The exhibition consists of new and existing work, with darkroom and giclée prints made from 35mm film sitting alongside Polaroids and writing.
Morris is an Irish photographer, writer and artist living in Scotland, working in analogue and digital photography, and mixed media. She has displayed her work in solo exhibitions and curated group salons in Scotland and Ireland: she has curated multiple photography exhibitions, and held her first solo show in 2023 and in 2024 won a Salon Prize at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh, for work in its Salon exhibition that year. Her 2024 project FACE / OFF was a group portrait enterprise pairing 26 photographers at random to photograph one another through their own creative briefs, and last year she curated and exhibited in The Postal Exchange – a collaborative project bringing together 24 artists who were randomly paired to exchange art materials through the post.
The exhibition forms part of The Hoxton’s Hox Gallery concept, developed as a meaningful way to support creative communities local to each hotel, fostering a connection between the hotel and its neighbourhood – an initiative developed in every Hoxton hotel globally. 2026 marks the company’s 20th anniversary, having begun as a single London hotel, and growing into a series of open-house hotels rooted in culture and community, with each hotel a reflection and extension of its neighbourhood.
