I am a sculptor/installation artist whose primary media include aluminum, plaster, rubber, digital technology, video and sound. My work, either solo or in collaboration with artists or scientists, is shown in galleries and public spaces. As a viewer, public art is my preferred form of art. It has a profound impact on how I interact with, and perceive, place. As an artist, I have been actively exploring new types of public art since 2001. I believe that art should be woven into the fabric of our environment and become an integral part of our lives. Public art activates space, provokes dialogue concerning critical issues, recalls important events, lifts community life, and liberates consciousness.
My installation Range Light Borden Carleton PEI 2010, came out of a series I started in 2001. As part of the Weyburn Project, I cast rooms at the Weyburn Mental Hospital, Saskatchewan, in latex rubber. Through this process I captured the essence of the architecture. In 2003 I created Skinning Place, Transforming Memory, which is another latex cast of the doctor’s house at Fort San, Fort Qu’Appelle. Both sites were once revered and important places for medical research but had become abandoned and abject. Today they no longer exist. Like these earlier works, Range Light Borden-Carleton PEI 2010 is a new type of memorial – ephemeral and anti-monumental. By bringing an imprint of the range light into the gallery space, this now disused and neglected structure gains a new type of stature.
Currently, I am part of a team of artists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities working on a large collaborative interdisciplinary public art project called Tracing the City: Interventions in Art in Public Space.
I live in Halifax and teach sculpture and installation at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design University.
Artist Website: www.kimmorgan.ca
