The Special Award of the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice
Morgan Wedderspoon | Canada
Give Up and Party
inkjet, silkscreen | 2017 | 61 x 86 cm
Help Others
inkjet, silkscreen | 2017 | 61 x 86 cm
Protect Yourself
inkjet, silkscreen | 2017 | 61 x 86 cm
Go About Your Life
inkjet, silkscreen | 2017 | 61 x 86 cm
My art practice is grounded in printmaking and sculptural installation, particularly found-object collection and display. I approach my surroundings through an ethnographic lens, seeking out and collecting the detritus of our contemporary environment, and draw on this assortment of objects gathered from the ground to create prints. Cast against the background of unfolding ecological disaster, my work interrogates the relationship between commodity culture, nature, and the ever-present problem of human coexistence within a larger-than-human sphere. I am struck by the trauma of living in a time of anthropogenic violence on a global scale and I aim to create work that sits with this grief while also giving strength and relief to promote healing. My collection practice began somewhat unconsciously. It developed out of noticing and becoming fascinated by certain passed-over things, residues of a collective way of life that almost disappear into the background. Like the field-walking archaeologist, I developed an open-ended practice of gathering found materials. In a nod to my taxonomic impulse, the assortment of objects includes fossils, bones, plant matter, and brightly coloured plastics. By bringing these materials into relation with one another, I hope to form new relationships and begin to suggest a different orientation of the human within the world based in care and imagination. I aim to create work that takes ecological form, work that is parasitic on old ways of thinking, producing playful and inventive new ways.
When beginning work on this series, I used a flatbed scanner to capture images of objects arranged on a flat surface and sometimes suspended to defy gravity. I composed images for each of the responses to crisis on the list, using objects that seemed to fit with each one in some way. Once I arrived at a resolved set of images, I printed them on a coated digital paper. I screenprinted the text.
