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George Morl (b. Basildon 1994)
Lives and works in Basildon

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George Morl uses their work to explore human connection under technological networks, and how bodies, perceptions of us, and language inform our engagements with environments and interfaces. Through paintings, sculptures, photography, performance, sound, and scientific installations, they interrogate heirarchies and social exchanges within shared physical and virtual spaces. Using the visual vocabulary and characters embedded in cyberspace, autobiography, and play they form fictions through conversing and colloborating with communities.

Recent dialogues include paintings assessing the construction of self-image and design of dating apps, collaboratively producing films within support centres, constructing and documenting personas to enter organisations to challenge power structures, interventions within museum collections responding to allegories of performance around masculinity, investigating relationships between rituals of steroid culture and online chatrooms through photographs, composing avatar murals which subvert and reimagine scenes in video games and art history with autonomy instead of objectification.

Through merging evidence, performance, and imagination, Morl seeks to reveal the relationship between power, barriers, and emotions in these systems and spaces, whilst posing questions around our existence in a modernising multidimensional hyperdigital future.

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George Morl (b.1994) is an artist and facilitator based in Basildon and Colchester. They currently are Programme Manager at Firstsite in Colchester, and were appointed the Jerwood Arts Newlyn Residency (2021-22) at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Penzance. Morl's multidisciplinary practice comprises of paintings, sculptures, photography and video, exploring human connection under technology and networks, communication, gender, often through affecting integrative and collaborative approaches between organisations, collections, and communities. Morl received their BFA from University for the Creative Arts in 2016 and MFA in 2018. They have curated major exhibitions such as Lunar Lullabies (2024) and the forthcoming first solo presentation of ‘Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances’ in East Anglia (2024).

‘Essex @way from keyboard?’ marked their first public artwork for Focal Point Gallery’s Railway Bridge commission 2022. In 2018 they undertook ‘Precious Boys’ a solo intervention at Southend Museums responding to the museum’s collection, investigating historical and contemporary relationships between allegory, masculinity, sexuality, and digital performance. Work has been shown at Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2022), Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance (2021), Tate Exchange, London (2019), Southend Museums (2018), UCA, Canterbury (2016), Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016). Recipient of Arts Council England Practice Grant (2022), New Histories, Cambridge (2022), Firstsite Award, Colchester (2019), TOW Residency, Southend (2020), and awarded the UCA Darren Henley Scholarship, Canterbury (2016- 2018). In 2020 Morl was a Peer to Peer UK/HK nominee and shortlisted for Platform Award 2016.


Updated 28 June 2024
All images and text © George Morl 2024