Other artworks, while undoubtedly derived from autobiography, point to more universal themes. “Undercurrent,” for example, depicts an arrangement of two rotating telephones, each acting as a base for the other. One of the phones looked normal and working, while the other had buttons exploding from the dial and letters similarly exploding upwards from the receiver. The phone call becomes a metaphor for the two most fundamental elements of any conversation—what is said and what is left unsaid, whether by carelessness or design. These inherent or implicit meanings are almost always secondary to the act of creation. “I really try not to worry about the content or the title of the piece,” Morin said. “Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I’ll really start to understand it. I don’t really understand it until I make it.”
One of the pieces was so personal that Morin couldn’t bear the thought of seeing it relocated. The piece, titled “Take a Break,” depicts a small figure standing on a log, holding a house in his hands and a snail shell on his back. “It had to do with me not having a home for a while,” Morin says. “I was living in my studio and moving around. It was about the idea of home and whether it was something intrinsic, and my thinking about what kind of stability I needed.” Shortly after completing Take a Rest, Morin received a commission that was enough to pay for a down payment on a house.
“I never thought this would happen. I just thought, I need to keep that piece,” she continued. “I took ‘Take a Break’ to a show and was afraid it would sell, so I priced it ridiculously high. And then someone asked about it! I was worried and didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Then, I realized, I couldn’t sell it. It didn’t matter, I just took it home.”
Morling’s journey into ceramics, as well as her long-standing mood towards ceramics, are the result of a gradual evolution. Her frustration with dyslexia, combined with uncaring educators, led her to prefer visual expression to literary expression from an early age. “I wanted to make art, but I didn’t know anything about anything else,” she said. Maureen attempted to combine these artistic desires with a more stable career by enrolling in a master’s program to become an art therapist. However, a pottery class disrupted her choices as she found the calling of the medium very different from anything she had experienced before. “Clay is so hypnotic, so tactile. It’s satisfying. I’ve tried working with metal, wood, fabric, everything. I don’t know of any other material that has this effect,” she says.
Whatever success she achieved, however, was the result of her struggle with learning and mistakes in those first few years. “The first time I tried art I felt like I couldn’t speak,” she says. “I kept trying to find the language. But once I found it, I quickly became fluent and could finally say what I wanted to say.”
Her early ceramic works consist of crudely crafted vessels and scenes. These were glazed, heavy-looking pieces that lacked the refinement and expressiveness to express what Morin wished to imagine. However, exactly what it is remains elusive. Searching for inspiration led her to realize that many of her most impressive and productive works of art were created by students at the Royal College of Art in London. She applied, was accepted, and began searching in earnest.
“Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I’ll really start to understand it. I don’t really understand it until I make it.”
Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I really start to understand it. I didn’t really understand until I made it. “
