Artist Kristen Morgin is spending fall 2011 at UGA, bringing her experience in ceramics, sculpture, painting, illustration, collage, assemblage and drawing to the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Her appointment as the 2011 Dodd Professorial Chair will have Morgin heavily invested in what she describes as the long conversation that is keeping all of these disciplines separate and compartmentalized.
“The different processes for various media help one another out but I haven’t been able to really marry all of them together,” Morgin said. “I get them to live together for periods of time and sometimes have children out of wedlock, but full commitment is a little beyond my reach.”
Morgin will give the Dodd Chair lecture Aug. 30 at 5:30 p.m. in Room 151 of the art school. Free and open to the public, the lecture will cover her background and influences, and include many images and stories about her work, its origins and the reasons behind her art as well as the problems she encounters creating it.
Morgin was born in Brunswick and spent her youth in San Jose, Calif. She has been working almost exclusively in unfired clay sculpture since receiving her M.F.A. at Alfred University in 1997. She began teaching ceramics at California State University, Long Beach, in 1999, where she was an associate professor of art until 2010, when she left to devote all of her time to her studio practice. Her work has been shown across the U.S., in Korea and in 2011 will be included in the 12th Istanbul Biennial.
Morgin’s work can be found in the collections of the UCLA Hammer Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art, as well as the private collections of Dean Valentine and Leonard and Susan Nimoy.
