Morgan Gilbreath

Morgan Gilbreath (b. 1990, USA) is an artist, educator, and fabricator working primarily with glass and found materials.  Morgan’s labor intensive craft practice investigates material memory and meaning through repeated rituals of deconstruction and renewal. Discarded objects and waste glass are processed into material and manifest into sculptures which oscillate between devotional objects, personal memorials and contemporary monuments.

Morgan holds a BFA in Glass and a BA in Art History from Tyler School of Art (Temple University) in Philadelphia. She has completed residencies at the Creative Glass Center of America (Wheaton Arts), Pilchuck Glass School, and the University of Texas Arlington. Exhibiting nationally and internationally, her work is in the permanent collection at the Museum of American Glass (Millville, NJ) and the Aldo Bellini Glass Collection at Castello Sforzesco (Milan, Italy).  Morgan lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where she maintains her studio practice and runs a small business specializing in kiln forming and cold working out of her home workshop.

During her May residency at S12, Morgan will continue her most recent series of collapsed glass structures and expand this material exploration into the hotshop.  This body of work utilizes a variety of scavenged glass materials stacked into intricate geometric towers that are slowly heated repeatedly in the kiln, where the work compresses, distorts, and eventually buckles.  The separately fused pieces are then combined together with other found elements to create the final sculptures. Architectural forms are built up, pushed to the point of collapse, and then rebuilt and repurposed on top of old structure, thus altering the accumulation of form.  This series uses heat, weight, and time to accelerate the geological process and explores the complex sediment of human history that remains after a civilization’s collapse and foreshadows the inevitable fate of all materials.