About your host

Morgen Bardati, New Denver BC

Specialties: Fibre and natural dye artist, Drawing, Printmaking

Morgen Bardati was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. She grew up barefoot on sandy beaches with the sound of ocean waves and the smell of the sea, a wild and wonderful life shaped within the painful milieu of a country in turmoil. As a teenage artist in high school Morgen painted dream landscapes of coniferous trees and mountain cabins. After completing a fine arts diploma at the East London School of Art and Design she traveled through Israel and Europe before immigrating to Canada. She eventually settled in the Kootenays with her family in 1995. In this new landscape of mountains, lakes and trees the land of her birth now lives only in her heart and dreams. 

Over almost three decades Morgen has exhibited paintings, fibre art, clothing designs, prints and drawings around the Kootenays. She has enjoyed teaching art to students of all ages in workshops, schools and in her studio. Her own continued education includes clothing design courses at Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson BC, natural dye and textile workshops with Maiwa School of Textiles in Vancouver, and in 2021 she completed The Art and Science of Herbalism course. Connection to her community though her involvement in social projects and event organizing is also important to her, nourishing her own growth as an artist in this world.

Informed by her curiosity for the natural world Morgen works with cloth, plant alchemy, stitching and drawing to contemplate themes of human movement, the meaning of security and our relationship with the environment. She is presently working on a series of hand embroidered seed vessels, and drawings with botanical inks she makes from plants and natural materials. A major ongoing work in progress is her Old Age Security Blanket project which she has been working on for almost a decade. She chooses elements and materials which are seemingly opposite, searching for the possibility of change in their meeting. Found objects like rocks and coins combined with stitched or printed drawing lines on cloth are a metaphor for the meeting of organic moving things of life with rigid structure. How humanity interacts with nature is an ongoing theme and a question reflected in her work.