About

Patricia Carr Morgan is a conceptual artist based in Tucson, Arizona who has shown her work in museums and galleries across the U.S. and in China, and has enriched communities with her public art. Morgan explores memory, loss, and reality through sculpture, interdisciplinary installation, and photography. It is this last medium that drives her new work, an exploration of glacier ice and climate change.

i love you don’t leave me examines the catastrophic effect of climate change through a multifaceted body of work built on the artist’s photographs of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. From the relative safety of an inflatable boat, Morgan focused not on the majesty of the monolithic icebergs but on the sculptural forms and fractured ice that constitute our continental ice sheets.

“In Antarctica, I was overwhelmed by the vast unending whiteness. It was intimidating and dangerous but also the most sublime piece of Earth I ever saw. It was love at first sight.”

Ice has the power to carve through mountains, to create prairies and lakes, but its strength diminishes as the glaciers melt. Knowing that what she had documented was gradually disappearing made her art both more urgent and poignant. Her sense of impending loss intensified as she experimented— with realism and abstraction, with materials and processes—to express her feelings and concerns.

The theme of love and loss is a bequest from previous work in which memorabilia informed the realities of memory. Here, Morgan reveals her relationship with the ice in a microcosm—its beauty, its danger, its fragility—to illuminate the crisis of global warming. What she kept returning to was the solemn and awe inspiring beauty of the ice.

The new body of work goes beyond literal representation to introduce Morgan’s vision of our planet’s store of glacier ice, to ask big questions about interconnectedness, moral obligation, and the future of our world. Through visual image and the affective experience of an immersive installation, Morgan invites us to think about what it will be like to lose that which we love