︎ Summary

‘Profiles From Essex’ (2022), Morl’s first artist film, explores how networks have evolved across the UK—from the arrival of electricity in Colchester to wireless connections in Cornwall—and how these infrastructures have shaped communities’ access to resources, identity, and future possibilities. The film builds on the queer narrative of migration, drawing on Steve McLean’s Postcards from London, in which a young man leaves Essex for London in search of fame and queer discovery, ultimately becoming a male escort through the performance of idealised male aesthetics.

However, Profiles From Essex also challenges and complicates this story. It counters romanticised ideas of migration by examining the enforced movement of disabled people into institutions and colonies across South Essex, a history linked to the eugenics movement. This is contrasted with Morl’s own family history: his grandmother’s journey through Basildon’s plotlands and his transgender, disabled cousin’s migration to Manchester, whose life later inspired the world’s first Transgender Memorial in Sackville Gardens.

Morl first met his cousin Suzie as a child, and in 2021 he travelled to Manchester to trace their shared histories. This research resulted in a series of imagined conversations that form a visual and auditory archive. The film contrasts physical migration with a newer form of movement: the way contemporary generations “migrate online,” using the internet to seek identity, connection, and possibility outside ableist societal barriers.

Since 2021, Morl has worked with disabled people across England within both physical and online spaces, recording audio histories and exploring how digital spaces can provide refuge, community, and self-definition. Profiles From Essex follows this theme by narrating the evolution of networks in Essex—from electricity, radio, and radar to multiplayer games and platforms such as Roblox—and how these systems now shape how people connect, communicate, and build futures.

As a semi-autobiographical work, the film traces diaristic thoughts and ambitions while questioning what it means to grow up within a family history of migration. It examines how contemporary technologies have become tools for survival, education, intimacy, and identity: from chatrooms and forums for sex education, to Tumblr for self-identification, YouTube for learning, game servers for socialising, and dating apps for self-presentation and connection. It also highlights how these platforms are used to purchase body-altering substances, monetize content, and construct curated identities.

The film also critiques the limitations of these spaces. Many digital platforms remain inaccessible, centralised in urban settings, and structured around narrow categories of representation. Bodies are objectified and reduced to stereotypes, while ableism persists in both interface design and cultural expectations. Morl links these contemporary exclusions to the historical foundations of acquisition and representation within museum collections.

Through this, Profiles From Essex asks whether true social integration requires us to dismantle the systems of categorisation and self-representation that divide us. The film draws inspiration from Leonora Carrington—educated in Chelmsford—whose surreal and mystical paintings reject binary and conventional representations, encouraging imagination beyond fixed identity.

Morl also consulted with Richard Bartle, co-designer of MUD, the first multiplayer game developed at Essex University. Their conversations emphasised the advantages of text-based interfaces and imagination, and explored why people use online games to escape reality.

Since 2020, Morl has continued conversations across online servers, support centres, and educational settings with disabled communities about the functionality, challenges, and potential of networks, as well as the liberating possibilities of imagination and science fiction.

The film layers text, visuals, and sound, combining screenshots of webchatrooms and app messages, live gameplay footage and hangouts, performed audio dialogues from servers, and manipulated archival footage of medical facilities and club scenes.

Ultimately, Profiles From Essex asks whether social integration can be achieved by abandoning rigid categorisation and representation—and instead dismantling the exclusivity of self-identified spaces in favour of shared, inclusive networks.

Commissioned by Focal Point Gallery in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre for New Histories 2022.

︎ Assosiated Awards

New Histories 2022
Focal Point Gallery: Railway Bridge Commission, 2022

© George Morl 2022
Install Photography Anna Lukala