.aesthetic talk
Patricia Carr Morgan
I Love You Don’t Leave Me
written Colter Ruland
After decades exploring memory and mortality, Patricia Carr Morgan looks towards the planet’s disappearing glaciers.
When Patricia Carr Morgan was 15 years old, she walked home from school one day and happened to notice a familiar print of flowered fabric hanging from the mulberry tree nearby.
This was in West Plains, MO. One can imagine what she saw, the fabric caught in the tree’s branches, fluttering nervously, the print’s flowers against the tree’s leaves forming a new species. The fabric, she realized, was from an article of her clothing. When she looked over at where the house should be, it was no longer there. A gas leak had filled the basement, ignited, and destroyed the house. The explosion had sent any contents that weren’t obliterated outright onto the yard and surrounding area, creating a new sphere of influence that would ripple throughout her life.
portrait Patricia Carr Morgan
“It destroyed everything,” Morgan recalls, “including all memorabilia.” Since then, her artistic practice throughout the decades has been about collecting and examining the remains of things that have been or are on the verge of being lost.
Morgan studied art history and eventually started creating conceptual art installations that exhibited in the United States and abroad. She went on to receive her MFA in interdisciplinary art from the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ, where she lives today.
“It isn’t surprising that death and memory are threaded throughout my work,” she says. “My father designed and made significant, monumental tombstones. Whenever I was at his business, I would play among the enormous slabs of granite waiting to be cut and carved, not understanding the depth of what they represented.”
The materials that would make up the majority of her art installations in the late 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, would be other people’s memorabilia, often found at estate sales. A number of these installations during this time are preoccupied with structures reminiscent of houses and tombs. In the video documentation of these exhibitions, Morgan describes what we are seeing and how she arrived at her concepts as if archiving customs and objects from a vaguely familiar yet disappeared world.
Tombs, hearths, and chimneys made of Plexiglas and neon, a burnt orange cube made with baby bottle nipples, a pitch black cube made from plate glass and asphalt—these kinds of structures housed objects Morgan gathered herself and invited viewers to leave behind. In Enclosure XVIII, a trapezoidal structure inspired by a visit to King Tutankhamun’s tomb, we find a gilded rib cage, rich soil, a dried lizard, and a corsage. In Dinner at Plexi’s, we find delicate china plates on which the dessicated remains of a dinner and dried flowers remain untouched. In Village One, we find pinned butterflies and nestled eggs. In Endocardial Vocabulary, we find a fax machine that continuously operates beside specimen jars filled with objects like a Bible, a children’s doll, and an animal skull. The list can go on and on, a catalog of once personal items turned into facsimiles of existence.
“It would be an honest answer to say I don’t know why I need to make art but I do know my art is a form of communication for me,” says Morgan. “It’s not a private diary of thoughts but of things I believe we all share, sometimes forget, and become unaware.” These existences, all stemming from personal though separated experiences, reach out and affect each of us. “I have always been aware that my concepts are universal,” she continues, “but it was during the process or sometime later that I realized how personal they were. Everyone has experienced a loss, has or has had a love, and is surviving.”
Nowhere would that universality of loss and survival be more apparent than in her current project, I love you don’t leave me, which applies her approach onto a massive scale as she attempts to personalize the impact of climate change.
Morgan remembers the first time she experienced the importance of glaciers on our planet at Yosemite National Park, where, millions of years ago, glaciers had carved the valleys Morgan found herself in. “My first memory of feeling at peace was in Yosemite,” she recalls. “Alone at the base of the Half Dome, I thought of the glacial power that had carved through the stone to create the spot where I sat, and my infinitesimal presence in the earth’s long journey was comforting.”
When she arrived in Antarctica, Morgan experienced a similar infinitesimal presence. “When I saw the majestic vastness of Antarctica’s white beauty,” she says, “the enticement of its many blues and greens revealed in the cracks and broken edges—I was overwhelmed. I fell in love, and it was slowly leaving.”
There’s an incredible amount of sadness attached to the way Morgan speaks about these glaciers, as if they’re long lost friends. This personal attachment is perhaps the strongest conceptual element of I love you don’t leave me and is something that has been surprisingly missing from much of the public discourse surrounding climate change and its impact on the environment. All of the calamitous data, projections, and perspectives about the state of the planet are too easily abstracted. Morgan imbues all this loss with personal meaning. We are indebted to these glacial landscapes and we should treat them as friends, she seems to suggest. Even her more straightforward photography of glaciers and icebergs, which forms the foundation of her multifaceted experimentations, are often of icebergs isolated in the water or the precarious point where the water meets the ice—while they are inherently beautiful, there is a profound sense of gorgeous loneliness that is inescapable.
Morgan later traveled to Greenland to take more photographs, returning to her studio in Tucson to search for “a way to express my concerns.” There, in the desert where water takes on new meaning, she has been experimenting with various iterations of her archive of images that manifest as multiple series in I love you don’t leave me. “I experimented a lot,” she says. “It was logical to think about how the polar regions were being destroyed, so I did a series expressing the degradation of that environment using coal and carbon. I continued to experiment, saving the bits and pieces that I liked. Eventually, I found the materials that became Blue Tears and expressed the beauty and majesty of the glaciers.”
Blue Tears is a conceptual art installation that first exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Art and is currently being planned to tour the country. The installation consists of sheets of silk organza, each around 17 feet long, onto which Morgan has printed her images of glaciers, icebergs, and wildlife. They hang suspended, their cold blue translucence conveying the fragility of the landscapes they represent. As part of the exhibition at the museum, Morgan released these layers over time, letting them gently, silently fall to the floor to create an “undulating ocean of silken glaciers.” The exhibition reportedly brought some to tears.
Patricia Carr Morgan
Altered States Greenland
carbon-based pigments and coal particles
from Altered States
One might think of her destroyed childhood house in a moment such as this and the “generations of mementos” strewn across the yard. These disappearing glaciers contain their own memories, they form their own record of the world throughout time in their ice cores, and as they melt such experiences are likewise lost forever. The possibility of life, and its implication of total collapse, is perhaps Morgan’s foremost concern in her entire body of work, now expanded on a grand scale in I love you don’t leave me.
Perhaps Morgan is expanding her universe, from the personal reconstructions of her earlier installations to the vastness of the polar regions. Or maybe she is simply asking us to consider things that seem larger than us as personal, too. Grandeur can be personal. We all pick from its fruit. Morgan is asking us to consider whether the tree can continue to bear it, bear us, and our indifference.
Some of her experimental series make the result of that indifference more overt, whether it is inflicting pristine images of white and blue glaciers with carbon-based pigments and coal particles or repeatedly using digital and analog processes to make landscapes fade, discolor, and become ghostly abstractions of their former selves.
“Trying to imagine it was fruitless. Was the future of Antarctica a seascape? What will happen to the beauty of the region? I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t predict it, so I sought to express its certain change, as well as our uncertainty. I introduced chance. Relinquishing control of my process and printing resulted in varying degrees of abstraction, conveying the melting, the changes, and the unknown.”
Morgan plans on returning to Greenland in August of 2022, and to Antarctica in February of 2023. “I’m looking forward to going back,” she says, “not only to take more photographs but to see the glaciers again. I expect it will be somewhat like going to a beach where we know the tides and currents have changed things, but it doesn’t look that different. Unless a glacier has receded beyond its anchoring point at the edge of the land, it will probably look similar to when I was there last.”
While Morgan’s body of work can be understood as an elegy for what has been lost, it is also about reconstructing that loss, of reframing our appreciation of beauty even when it is disappearing. Even if our existence should disappear altogether, one hopes someone as astute as Morgan will one day in the future collect the remains of our own experiences and likewise treat them with care.
Patricia Carr Morgan
Greenland, 2015-2016
from Ice Greenland, Antarctica