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Michael Morgan – Locust Leap June 2024 — ongoing brickworksmichaelmorgan.com RECEPTION September 7, 2024 3-6pm
View Morgan's 2024 installation at the Philadelphia International Airport, Terminal A West, Philadelphia Earth, through October 20th this year. Further details here. |
I work with brick as my primary medium. We are all familiar with this geometric building unit especially in the brick-centric towns of America’s east coast, so if it is used to create sculpture it can help us see the specialness of the everyday world. A brick sculpture can, without relying on overt representation, express a myriad of concepts. Just some of these concepts that I have conveyed through my artwork are: feelings of growing out of the ground, community, the passing of time, and of exuberance and dynamic movement.
— Michael Morgan Philadelphia-based artist Michael Morgan (b. England) has created a resonant new site-specific piece at Street Road, located on a part of our 5 acres that will be highly visible to passing traffic exiting a new roundabout, currently under construction and slated for completion Fall 2024.
Morgan’s work, which centers brick as a medium, has both a groundedness and a sense of flight and endless expansion. His methods are archaeologic: his gathering of materials is rooted in walking, the exploration of past industrial sites and middens, and the collection of stray and unusual artifacts - especially in forgotten or neglected places (including the former back alley behind his home, used in centuries past as a trash heap and general dumping ground). Brick and unlikely found objects are brought together, refashioned, and celebrated in his process, with finished, installed works speaking to the often mysterious and also mundane histories of these materials, and at the same time referring firmly to the present in which they are situated. His Arches of Resurgence, for example, commissioned by SEPTA and installed in Philly's Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, references trees in nearby Fairmount Park, the neighborhood's architecture, and ideas of resurgence, and aptly incorporates this quote from onetime nearby resident, John Coltrane: "Look back at the old things and see them in a new light." The new Street Road sculpture has a solidity and at the same time a centripetal feel: three intersecting arches ground the work, and then a burst of delicately hand-worked brick and found object assemblage pieces fans out explosively from this base. Passers-by might see in the whole the rotary motion of the projected roundabout as well as the feeling of spinning, or peeling off from a circular point. While this new work was not commissioned with the coming roundabout specifically in mind, the dynamism of sculpting and installing next to a construction site has clearly infiltrated and been expressed in this work and it's hoped that new visitors, and passing drivers too, will enjoy Morgan's nod to past, present, and future traffic patterns here. Installation views
Morgan in the studio |
