Morag Ballard was born in London in 1961 and studied at Chelsea School of Art before studying sculpture at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham in 1982-85. In 1986, she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice where she had the opportunity to absorb and learn from the works of 20th-century abstract masters in the collection. After a period living in Scotland, Ballard moved to Cornwall in 1991.

For many years Ballard has been drawn to the work of the artists working in St Ives in the 1930s, '40s and '50s who had an affinity with the European abstract movement. Her own images  explore shape, form and colour relationships: abstraction is her method of understanding and depicting space. From the artists she particularly admires, such as Tunnard, Gabo, Wells, Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier, Tatlin and Helion, Ballard has absorbed what she refers to as 'a cocktail of visual language to reinterpret and express in painting', and has evolved her own individual interpretation of the language of abstraction.

Ballard's paintings are primarily explorations of formal geometric abstraction, although she often incorporates forms derived from the observable reality of landscape and architecture - the experience of the light and the sea of Cornwall is also a significant influence on her work. Some works emerge from her experience of specific places, both man-made or natural, that offer what she describes as 'a structural drama with which I can explore', including the play between two and three dimensions evidenced in both her paintings and painted wood reliefs. Ballard describes herself as 'a constructivist at heart' and her use of the abstract constructivist language practised by earlier abstract artists is transformed to the requirements of her own personal vision. Peter Davies commented in his book, St Ives Revisited, that Ballard 'introduces an on-going freshness to a mode of work that one more easily associates with Gabo's closest followers... She uses the same language of curvilinear planes, spirals and sweeping linear rhythms... Illusionism is a subordinate feature on concrete surfaces of interpenetrating planes, intersecting lines and rhythmic colours.'

Morag Ballard has had seven solo exhibitions with England & Co since 1991, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions curated by the gallery. In 2010, three of her paintings from past exhibitions at England & Co accompanied the exhibitions John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space and St Ives and Beyond at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

Copies of the following illustrated exhibition catalogues are available. Contact the gallery by email or telephone with enquiries/orders.

MORAG BALLARD: Recent Paintings 14 June-12 July 2008 26 pages, 22 colour illustrations Introduction by Jane England Chronology, Solo Exhibitions, Group Exhibitions, Selected Bibliography ISBN-13 978-1-902046-44-0	£6
MORAG BALLARD: Recent Work 9 November-3 December 2005 26 pages, 24 colour illustrations Introduction by Jane England Chronology, Solo Exhibitions, Group Exhibitions, Selected Bibliography ISBN 1 902046 34 X	£8
MORAG BALLARD: Recent Work 1-29 November 2003 26 pages, 22 colour illustrations Introduction by Jane England Chronology, Solo Exhibitions, Group Exhibitions, Selected Bibliography ISBN 1 902046 24 2	£8
MORAG BALLARD: Recent Work 9 May-5 June 2001 24 pages, 18 colour illustrations Introduction by Morag Ballard; book extract by Peter Davies Chronology, Solo Exhibitions, Group Exhibitions, Selected Bibliography ISBN 1 902046 11 0	£10
MORAG BALLARD: Constructions, Reliefs, Paintings 7 October-6 November 1993 8 pages, 4 colour illustrations, 7 b/w illustrations Essay by Peter Davies Chronology, Artist's Statment; extract by Sister Wendy Beckett	£6
MORAG BALLARD: Constructions, Reliefs and Works on Paper 12 September-5 October 1991 3-fold brochure, 2 colour illustrations, 5 b/w illustrations Artist's statement; Introduction by Wendy Beckett	£8
Set of all six MORAG BALLARD catalogues	£40