Artist Statement
Pol Morton makes assemblage paintings and sculpture about queerness, transness, and disability. In Morton’s diaristic paintings, oil paint encrusts collaged personal photography and refuse, including medical debris. Morton intersperses used disposable hospital clothes with sequin patches and flowers cut out from get-well-balloons, even building a makeshift accessibility device for a canvas out of their used wheelchair and broken bicycle wheels. Morton plays with the beauty and humor in the experiences of injury, chronic illness, and the American hospital system. Their work takes on intimate, quotidian moments from their life being bedbound, sitting in a wheelchair, and walking around the city of New York with a cane. Sequin patches stand in for scars, surrounded by rainbows of oil paint delighting in the beauty of pink and red inflammation, purple bruising, and yellow pus. All collaged photos in the works are taken by the artist while bedbound and on physical therapy walks. Photos are surrounded by cat hair, walking cane tips, the artist’s pubic hair, and other personal objects. Hand-drawn lines trace their walking cane and delineate the slashes of scars and wounds from the artist’s body. Morton’s work is about having an unreliable body, addressing the dissociation and fragility of flesh that is in a constant state of unwellness while building a visceral reality that is playful, humorous, and idiosyncratic.
