Commended: Emily Morgan’s Autobiographical Collage

See a list of all the winners and commended artists here.

An artist photo: Emily is a white woman with pink hair and tattoos of fruit and flowers on her arm. She is bursting out of some paper collage materials.

This week, we extend a very warm welcome to Emily Morgan, a collage artist based in Columbus, Ohio. Emily’s work exists at the intersection of the natural and surreal. Focusing on excising shapes and forms from otherwise recognizable figures, her collages fill in the gaps with subtle, unexpected elements. Emily is the founder of the Columbus Collage Collective and creates under the name Lovely But Dead.

Ghosts #2

Emily explains that this piece was constructed by creating stencils from a modern fashion photograph of two women, then carefully cutting their joined and individual silhouettes from three antique architectural prints taken from Denkmäler Deutscher Renaissance—a folio of German Renaissance architecture published in 1884.

Emily also shares her thought on how the artwork connects to her as an Ohio woman and to women she knows in the state:

The women in this piece are not women—they are ghosts. They are whispers of a photograph torn from an overpriced fashion magazine and inserted into the past to see how they fit. They exist for the joy of creation, for the strange delight of experiencing the spark of synchronicity between unexpected images. The figures in this image feel haunted not because they are ghosts of history, but because they weren’t supposed to exist at all. They came together through improvisation, precision, careful layering, and the permission to follow intuition over logic. At its core, this piece is about me—my process, my body, my pace, and how I cope with existence. It reflects my refusal to make art that explains itself or fits neatly into meaning. It is a celebration of creating for the sake of curiosity, instinct, and surprise. Art doesn’t always need to be explained. This piece embraces that. It resists over-definition and invites the unexpected. It is the collage equivalent of a deep exhale—a reminder that sensation is enough.

See more of Emily’s work at:

Instagram: @lovely_but_dead

Website: https://www.lovelybutdead.com

Women of Ohio