Sue Morgan

Sue Morgan’s work has a focused research interest in neuroscience, cartography, the sociology of science, and the philosophy of the mind. As such, Morgan's art practice is a compelling and intellectually rigorous project that expands past being solely pictorial and sculptural, and which embraces investigations into the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mental work of the mind, and its translation into both visual art and socially constructed linguistic and spatial frameworks. Morgan uses materials such as wood, clay, wax and metal, producing incredibly tactile and visceral works. In her major installation piece 'The Various Lives of Thoughts', Morgan goes in search of a thought inside the head. Shipping crates are packed with three dimensional ‘thoughts’- metaphors of the mind, often humorous, made from an assortment of clay characters, wax globules and machined metal objects together with intricately drawn maps, collage and etchings framed on the wall.

Being an artist, however, has not been Morgan’s primary career; she is an accomplished academic, having completed a doctorate in German Philosophy at Cambridge and she initially worked in the City as a successful corporate tax lawyer before retiring at 37, as a result of the diagnosis of schizo-affective disorder. Her mental illness clearly resonates in her topics of investigation, and her art provides for her a therapeutic avenue of disownership; by attempting to allow her subconscious to creatively and practically express the immaterial, and specifically, schizophrenic thoughts in her head, Morgan has found a way to translate her own mental objects onto and into the physical medium of art. Ultimately, Morgan’s practice alerts us to our incomplete human condition of always becoming, rather than ever achieving a definitive state of being.

Morgan graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with a distinction in her Drawing BA in 2008, and has a prolific portfolio of wood work courses, metal work courses, ceramics courses and printing courses. Morgan was first discovered by Sarah Myerscough Fine Art after she applied for the gallery's esteemed DLA Piper Award Prize in 2009, and has since had two solo exhibitions with gallery, one at the London Art Fair 2010 Project Space, and one in the gallery's West End space in early 2010. Morgan's installation 'The Various Lives of Thoughts' was also included and greatly admired in the exhibition Bedlam held in the Globe Theatre in 2010.