Helen Morgan

Helen Morgan is an emerging artist working in the fields of printmaking, photography and installation. Her work looks at overlooked materials and objects within the everyday, informed by Morgan’s upbringing in her century-old maternal family home in south-western Sydney, and by her Egyptian-Australian heritage. In 2018, Morgan was awarded the Jenour Foundation Fine Arts MFA Scholarship and the Mark Henry Cain Memorial Travel Scholarship by the National Art School, Sydney. In 2019, the latter of these saw her undertake independent study of modern and contemporary art in Europe, developing her practice at the Glasgow Print Studio and through residencies in remote locations, including the Cill Riallaig Artist Village in Ireland and on the tiny Hebridean island of Iona. Morgan holds a Master’s degree in printmaking, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Diploma of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited in regional, commercial, and artist-run galleries across NSW.

It’s a bit of a mystery what I did wrong to create these prints. I was trying to make test prints of two new plates that I had just etched to see what they looked like. The image printed should have been a simple gradient – black at the bottom and white at the top, and subsequent prints I made from these plates show just that. I think when I did these, the ink must have been too sticky because it was hard to wipe and some of the paper stuck to the plate and tore off. I like how different these prints are to what was actually on the plate, and how, even though they were inked and printed at the same time and in the same way, they are very different to each other. They were too beautiful to throw away. They remind me of grainy black and white films, white noise on a TV set, or a snowstorm.