︎ Summary

The works 'Boys Blowing Up Bladders' and 'Precious Boys' are a homage to William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'. The work is informed by the romantic and enlightening portrayals of youths in the paintings of Francis de Goya depicting boys picking fruit of trees and blowing up bladders. Formed through plaster casts of medical consumables, they contrast the representation of curiosity and innocence of youths in playing with animal matter to today’s journey of self-awareness in adolescence in relation to one's sexuality.

“This work was first inspired by walks across moonlit graveyards lighting up gravestones in Canterbury reflecting upon experiences in Essex. This was at a time when I was writing numerous poems and texts about men's loneliness and the relationship between technology and the body. I was immensely inspired by 20th Century war poems and Blake's tales of experiences and representations of morality and nurture amongst sorrow and angst. I identified this as a struggle to seek affection in a notably post-industrial landscape. With a sense of crippling fear of loneliness, or anxiety about one's appearance in order to be accepted, this is especially pertinent in the queer community. Precious Boys is a visual nursery rhyme depicting the apparent abdomens of men laying upon the ground. The overhead organ instrumental is eclipsed by the harmony of men crying and moaning like the war torn fields in the Battle of the Somme. Whereas war was the defying image of early 1900's, the silent disguised sheer plethora of suffering of digital technology users sharing images of torsos and muscles is the image of today. To feel like we can be loved, we first have to feel validated”

︎ Further Reading

Platform Focus, Contemporary Visual Art Network, 30 April 2019
Platform Award Alumni Stories: George Morl, CVAN, 13 May 2019
George Morl, Precious Boys, Southend Museum Blog, 20 July 2018
Morl George, George Morl’s Precious Boys at Southend Museum, CVAN South East, 10 July 2018
Graduates Work Selected for Turner Contemporary, uca.ac.uk, 20 September 2016

︎ Exhibitions

Platform 2016, Turner Contemporary, 04 August - 25 September 2016
UCA Degree Show, Herbert Read Gallery, June 2016

︎ Assosiated Awards

Darren Henley Scholarship, 2016
Platform Award, 2016, Nominated
UCA Vice Chancellor Award, 2016