Artist Talk - Georgia Morgan

Please join us for this in-person artist talk with Georgia Morgan

There are a million kinds of artists in the world
and right now I’m this kind.

My name is Georgia Morgan (b. Eora Nation | Sydney 1992) and I am a Tamil Australian artist. My practice is devotional and aspirational. It is storytelling. I am in one place and longing for another (that may or may not exist).

My practice is multidisciplinary and includes large-scale site-specific installations, photographs, videos, paintings and ceramics. Materiality, play, intuition and imagining inform my process.

When I look at the work I have made, I repeatedly think of puja. Puja is a hindu act of worship that involves offering physical objects — such as gold, fruit or flowers — to an image of a god. Sometimes gold foil or plastic fruit or flowers are offered. This doesn’t detract from the value of worship, as it is the conviction of the action that matters.

This knowledge and use of material is consistent in my practice.

It is what I say it is. You believe cause I believe.

In this presentation,  Georgia will delve into the motivations behind their work. The discussion will expand on themes of ‘Interfacial Intimacies’ focusing on their work, The dream is real, and the way their practice has developed since graduating UTAS in 2019.

Georgia's work, The dream is real, is currently on show as part of Interfacial Intimacies at Plimsoll Gallery.

About this event

This presentation is associated with the exhibition Interfacial Intimacies on show at the Plimsoll Gallery from 8 June – 5 August 2023.

Interfacial Intimacies

What does it mean to be the absolute essence of who you are without being wedded to any of it?

For a long time, the ‘self’ was considered a stable and trustworthy container within which you can be found.

Emerging theories of selfhood recognise that it isn’t so simple. We know that we can have as many social selves as the people who recognise us. Rather than being fixed and always coherent, our personalities can be participated in as a plethora of parallel processes and possibilities. Of transformation. Of continuous becoming.

This exhibition brings together artists who hold and express tenderly the multiple aspects of their selves through a series of portraiture and anti-portraiture. With photography, film, painting, installation, textile, and performance, this exhibition explores the tensions

of our networked personalities - our shadows, our masks, our shame.

Yet, the artists retain their agency and their ‘right to opacity’, to resist being wholly understood, or essentialised; towards an openness of cultural hybridity, to being visible while not being wholly transparent.

How will you show up today?

Artists: Bruno Booth, Amrita Hepi, Léuli Eshrāghi, Bhenji Ra, Aleks Danko, Cassie Sullivan, Georgia Morgan, Cigdem Aydemir, David Rosetzky, and Shea Kirk.

Curator: Caine Chennatt

^{Artwork image credits (top to bottom):
Georgia Morgan, The dream is real, 2021 Fine art inkjet print 80w x 120h (cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery}

^{Georgia Morgan, portrait, Courtesy of the artist.}

^{Exhibition development received assistance through the Contemporary Art Tasmania Exhibition Development Fund and was produced by the University of Tasmania – Library and Cultural Collections}