Mirabelle Morah’s work occupies a compelling territory between motion design, image-collage and illustrations for motion, as well as culturally embedded visual storytelling. Across a practice that moves between autonomous creative work and commissioned design for commercial and business purposes. Rather than treating communication as an exercise in reduction, Morah builds compositions through accumulation: symbols, textures, colours, photographs, digital forms and movement are allowed to coexist without being flattened into a single visual language.
This resistance to simplification is central to understanding her work. Contemporary motion design is frequently governed by immediacy. An image is expected to communicate rapidly, particularly when it operates on a screen. Morah instead makes the second look important. Her strongest pieces initially offer the seductive accessibility of graphic design before revealing considerably more complicated questions of identity, cultural inheritance and representation.
New Wave Man is perhaps the clearest manifestation of this approach. A sharply constructed male figure occupies the centre of a vivid geometric composition, surrounded by areas of turquoise, yellow, pink, purple and black. His elongated form, angular face, tinted glasses and richly patterned clothing give the work the directness of a contemporary editorial illustration, yet the apparent simplicity of the image is deceptive.
Morah draws upon several distinct African cultural references rather than presenting African identity as a single aesthetic category. Elements associated with Igbo and Yoruba dress, Adinkra symbolism and the Efik cap are placed within the same visual field. The decision is significant. Cultural signs are not dissolved into an anonymous decorative vocabulary; their differences remain visible.
The work therefore functions less as a conventional portrait than as a constructed proposition about identity. The figure becomes a site upon which histories, geographies and contemporary visual culture converge.
Its augmented reality component develops this idea further. Viewed in static form, New Wave Man presents one configuration. Through digital activation, additional forms of dress and cultural reference emerge. Motion is therefore not an embellishment attached after the image has been completed. It changes the way the work is read.
This is important to Morah’s wider practice. Technology is strongest in her work when it creates an intellectual as well as visual consequence. The viewer moves from assuming that the image has already been understood to recognising that the first encounter was incomplete.
There is also considerable confidence in Morah’s handling of colour. The palette of New Wave Man could easily become overwhelming. Instead, large geometric divisions establish a framework within which pattern and figuration can operate. Black areas provide visual punctuation while fluorescent and saturated passages energise the surface. White wireframe structures cut across the figure and background, introducing something recognisably digital into an otherwise highly tactile-looking composition.
The effect is deliberately synthetic. Morah makes little attempt to disguise the work’s digital construction, and this is one of its strengths. Vector-like edges, graphic overlays, pattern and technological references are not employed in pursuit of imitation. They acknowledge the screen as a legitimate visual space in its own right.
The accompanying variations of New Wave Man strengthen the conceptual premise. Altering the figure’s headwear changes more than costume. Each variation subtly reorganises the cultural reading of the portrait while the identity of the central figure remains stable. Morah uses repetition to suggest that identity can accommodate plurality without becoming incoherent.
That question of transformation reappears elsewhere in her motion work.
In Calabar, organic and photographic imagery is subjected to an altogether different form of construction. Flowers, sculptural fragments, botanical surfaces and black-and-white figures accumulate around an enlarged green form set against blue. Bright orange-red petals interrupt the composition dramatically. Fragments appear to exist at different visual depths while digital markings, co-ordinates, dotted pathways and typography introduce the visual language of mapping and technological systems.
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- Calabar, motion graphics design by Mirabelle Morah with select photography credit to Ben Iwara
The result is more unstable than New Wave Man and, deliberately, less easily resolved. Text surfaces and disappears as the composition changes. Botanical imagery can appear lush in one moment and uncanny in the next.
Here Morah’s collage method becomes especially effective. She works through collision rather than seamlessness. Elements retain evidence of their different origins. Photography is recognisable as photography, digital typography as typography, organic forms as organic forms. Instead of disguising those differences, she makes their coexistence the subject.
Her short motion piece Everyone Is Taken reveals another side of the practice. Against a restrained neutral field, isolated abstract objects occupy rounded rectangular spaces while fragments of the phrase “everyone else is already taken” unfold through time. Compared with the density of Calabar or New Wave Man, this work is markedly reduced.
That reduction is useful because it demonstrates that Morah’s visual identity does not depend simply upon saturated colour or maximal layering. Her sense of pacing is equally significant. Objects appear, disappear and are replaced, with the typography acting almost as a temporal structure. Meaning is produced sequentially rather than simultaneously.
Man on Roof similarly demonstrates Morah’s willingness to allow motion to alter the relationship between image and environment. It looks at the connection between Scottish fairytales of elves and how they would be represented in modern day, still watching over cities. A brightly illustrated, elf-like figure and oversized flower forms are introduced into photographic architecture of Glasgow before the visual world shifts towards a more fully graphic construction. The transition creates an ambiguity between observed and imagined space. What initially resembles an intervention within a real environment gradually becomes its own pictorial world.
Across these works, Morah is most convincing when form, technology and subject are interdependent. Augmented reality has become common enough within contemporary creative practice that its presence alone is no longer inherently innovative. Morah’s achievement lies instead in identifying circumstances in which technological mediation and motion graphics design has conceptual purpose.
There are productive tensions within the work. The density of cultural and visual information occasionally brings Morah close to overloading the image. A viewer without knowledge of the references may initially read culturally specific material primarily as pattern. Yet this difficulty is also bound to the central proposition of the practice. Morah is consciously asking whether design should always accommodate instantaneous comprehension.
Rather than eliminating ambiguity, she makes it useful.
Her professional design practice reinforces this ability to move between complexity and communication. Morah has developed visual systems across motion, campaign design, digital interfaces, branding and communications, with work extending across social and international contexts. Her experience includes global branding and visual communications for the Social Enterprise World Forum and design work connected with organisations and initiatives operating across multiple countries.
More recently, her practice has expanded through Grohwie Studio, where she works as Creative Director in motion design. She has also developed tools and resources intended for other designers, including an open-access design library. This broader activity matters because it situates Morah not simply as a maker of individual images but as a designer concerned with the systems through which visual culture is produced and shared.
Her exhibition of New Wave Man at the Bradford African Festival of Arts in August 2026 is particularly pertinent to the development of the more autonomous strand of her work. Moving an augmented reality artwork from the screen into an exhibition context changes the relationship between work and audience. The viewer is no longer simply consuming digital content but actively participating in its disclosure.
Morah’s strongest quality is the coherence between this interaction and the ideas behind it. Her work repeatedly asks viewers to reconsider an initial judgement: to look again, activate something, wait for an image to change or recognise another cultural reference.
That structure has particular relevance at a time when digital visual culture increasingly rewards speed, instant recognition and frictionless consumption. Morah proposes the opposite. She uses the tools of contemporary motion design to slow interpretation down.
There is considerable potential in taking this further. The most interesting future direction for the practice is not necessarily greater technical complexity, but greater confidence in allowing the conceptual implications of these hybrid identities and cultural encounters to dominate. When Morah’s formal decisions are attached to a precise question, as they are in New Wave Man, the resulting work moves beyond accomplished graphics and illustrated motion design, and becomes much more significant as contemporary design.
What distinguishes Mirabelle Morah is therefore not one particular medium or aesthetic device. It is her ability to move between communication and ambiguity, professional design and experimental image-making, cultural specificity and digital technology without treating those territories as mutually exclusive.
Her work is visually assured, technically versatile and increasingly distinctive. More importantly, it demonstrates an understanding that design can communicate without reducing complexity. At its best, Morah’s practice does not merely present cultural plurality as a subject. It builds plurality into the actual structure of the image, asking the viewer to participate in the process of discovering it.
That is a sophisticated proposition, and one that places her emerging body of motion and mixed-media work within a genuinely contemporary conversation about what design can do when it refuses to make identity simpler than it actually is.
Critical Review by Lisa Gray
The Flux Review
United Kingdom | August 2026
