Events
Saturday 23 March, 2pm
Talk: Sue Morgan Archival Work and Q&A – Bethlem Gallery
Saturday 27 April, 11am-1pm
Workshop: The city of lost minds, with Sue Morgan – Bethlem Gallery
Planet209 Revisited: Past & Present Relics of Visual Experiments
31 January – 27 April 2024
Bethlem Gallery
Audio descriptions of this exhibition available on our website or on our free digital guide.
Bethlem Gallery presents a major new retrospective of artist Sue Morgan. Covering three decades of work, Planet209 Revisited: Past & Present Relics of Visual Experiments showcases Morgan’s fascination with alternative realities and scientific exploration.
Sue Morgan states ruefully that ‘none of what I do is serious.’ Over 200 works, however, shown in this exhibition and spanning three decades, address issues in ways that can be very serious – as well as scientific, artful and playful – and demonstrate Morgan’s wide-ranging artistic practice.
Morgan remains blown away by how art transforms the mental into the physical, and is often driven by a seed of an idea from the ‘phenomenological swamp’ that interests her. With a voracious intellectual interest in the world, she uses her art practice not only as therapeutic tool but as part of the process of being in the world, of making sense of it – ‘You can pretty much explore the whole universe by putting a pin in an object.’ There is an overarching tone of scientific enquiry to her work, a sense of the artist as observer and cataloguer. Morgan’s practice is meticulous – she uses constraints as an inspiration and loves to draw. For Morgan, drawing is like learning a language. ‘A line can express so many things depending on its intensity, its hardness and its direction’.
Morgan says that you shouldn’t need to know about her and her work, as that’s ‘just gossip’. She makes work because she has to. We invite you to come and see it.
Artist biography
Sue Morgan read philosophy, biology and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and completed a doctorate there in eighteenth-century German philosophy. She worked in the city as a corporate tax lawyer until forced to retire in 1998 due to a schizophrenic illness. It was during time spent in hospitals that she started working visually and in 2008 gained a first-class degree in drawing from Camberwell College of Arts.
After 10 years away looking after her parents in Wales, Morgan returned to London in January 2023 and began working again with Bethlem Gallery. This show incorporates some works from her first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2001, subsequent work up to 2012, and recent work from 2023.
Planet209 is the invented planet inhabited by her “mad head” and contains an oblique reference to a section of tax law that she was studying before “the insanity took over”.
Morgan maintains that she has no self-identity as an artist but is instead engaged in a visual making of footnotes to an increasingly large and desolate blank text. In fact, if asked what she does, she is apt to reply that she has “not decided yet”.
Sue Morgan has published several books of her artwork which are available via print-on-demand or as PDF versions on this link.