Collage artist Emily Morgan follows her intuition

In February 2024, Emily Morgan took part in Februllage, an open submission project hosted by the Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum in which collage artists create daily pieces based on a series of prompts.

The challenge coincided with a point in time during which Morgan navigated a handful of creative and personal changes that combined to bring about a dynamic shift in her work. These ranged from relatively infinitesimal choices (the artist switched from utilizing white paper for her collages to black) to comparatively life-altering developments that included a relocation from Groveport to Clintonville and the decision to begin therapy. 

As a result, the warmer, more colorful collages Morgan previously constructed on white began to give way to darker, more introspective pieces layered atop black paper – a shift in tone that helped give birth to the artist’s new exhibit, “Decomposition: Dusk Effect,” which segments these creative periods into dawn and dusk and spreads the work over two floors at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington.

“The way I’ve ordered the exhibition is chronological, so it shows people the whole transition,” said Morgan, aka Lovely But Dead, who will be on hand for an opening reception at the MAC on Thursday, May 8. “I have pictures of all the work laid out in my living room and dining room, and I remember it being like, whoa, this is a lot to take in, because I’d never seen all the work side by side like that. And when I did, I found it did tell a story. … And I think it was a story of figuring it out.”

This statement could apply to the practice of collage – Morgan is still relatively new to the form, having created her first piece in 2022 – but also more broadly to her own life and journey.

“In my past, I’ve had a lot of dependencies – drugs, alcohol, people – and dependencies don’t allow you to develop your inner-self fully, and you end up mirroring the things around you,” Morgan said. “And I think collage art fixed that or at least set me on the path to fixing that. … People first got to know me through this light, floral work, and I think I was making that work for other people. And by transitioning to these darker and more introspective pieces, I think it was me kind of using the art to dive a little deeper and really make something for myself.”

These deeper revelations extended from a simple realization: The act of cutting paper is something from which Morgan derives pleasure. The artist tends toward “fussy, fine cuts,” as she described them, utilizing an X-ACTO blade to carefully excise flowers, animals and figures from magazines and printed pages – drawing a majority of her flora from a digital copy of the long-out-of-print book Köhler’s Medicinal Plants. While cutting, Morgan said, she’s able to let outside concerns wash away and give her brain needed space to rest.

The artist said she’s also drawn to the freedom allowed by the form, describing it as a welcome contrast with her career as an analytics manager for a Fortune 500 company. “A lot of my time is spent in very logical and linear and systems thinking,” said Morgan, who in August 2023 co-founded the nonprofit Columbus Collage Collective with the aim of developing spaces in which collage artists of all levels can gather to create. “The ability to intuitively place these things really takes me out of that ‘systems’ thinking. I like to say I work in digital and play in analog.”

A number of the pieces on display in “Decomposition: Dusk Effect” include flowers, which Morgan attributed to an early Covid-era hobby that helped to pave the way for collage. “I was stuck in the house, and I started making pressed flowers,” said Morgan, who adopted the name Lovely But Dead from this practice. “And I think that really started to wake up that intuitive feeling. And then in the collage art, it just exploded.”

While some collage artists keep files filled with pre-cut images, Morgan starts from scratch with each piece, cutting everything to order, in a sense. For that reason, she often doesn’t know precisely what she’s wrestling with in a given piece until she finishes and gains some distance from the work. “I know it sounds strange, but I never know what a piece is going to look like when I sit down at my desk, and I really try not to think about it while I’m doing it,” she said. “But then looking back, yeah, it does kind of tell the story of where I was in that moment and how I was feeling. Did I tear the paper? Did I spend time on it? Is it black and white? Is it a weirder, more surrealist piece?”

One piece Morgan created during Februllage and dubbed “The Wolf,” for example, has come to personify a range of emotions, from beauty and rage to something “almost like manipulation,” the artist said. “There’s a tiny detail on her shirt,” Morgan continued. “And it’s sheep. It’s like she’s wearing her victim, in a way. She’s this beautiful, alluring creature, but she’s also gonna eat you.”