For #TheSecondLife, Sasha Saben Callaghan has created a video (available as close captioned and audio described) that outlines Edwin Morgan’s Scrapbooks and their importance socially, historically and personally. The Image of Here and Now invites disabled people to respond to this video and the scrapbooks of Edwin Morgan by making their own collages and sharing on social media platforms using hashtag #morethanimagesem100 and @edmorgantrust. Collages will be shared here, and will form a digital replacement of the empty pages in Edwin Morgan’s final scrapbook, number 16 from 1967.
Video, invitation and images from Sasha below:
The sixteen scrapbooks of collaged images and text Edwin Morgan began assembling as a young boy are a dizzy mix of surrealism, social history, political commentary, pop culture and homo-eroticism.
Sasha Saben Callaghan, 2021
Each is a cut-and-paste jewel box of past lives and fragments of text, suspended in time and captured in fifty four thousand images.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the scrapbooks is how they break off, after nearly forty years, with the final volume, number sixteen, unfinished.
As a disabled artist and collagist, I felt this vacuum was crying out to be filled and over recent months, themes from the collection have been a major influence on my work.
For me, Edwin Morgan’s connection with disabled people is through his use of collage to both question and affirm identity, but the scrapbooks are also a testament to collage as an inclusive and accessible medium with stunning results.
And there are so many themes to respond to in Edwin Morgan’s work. Monsters, white-haired girls, and bizarre coincidences all fire the imagination.
So, the next stage of ‘The Image of Here and Now’ is to invite disabled people to respond to Edwin Morgan’s work by creating new pages for scrapbook sixteen.
Just use the hashtag #morethanimagesem and tag 100@edmorgantrust to share your collages on social media.
Let’s fill those empty pages from 1967 with the strange and beautiful from the present.
Edwin Morgan Trust 