Artist Pol Morton works across assemblage, photo documentation, painting, and sculpture with a deeply diaristic relationship to materials and composition.

In Get Well, now up at NYC’s Olympia Gallery through October 5, Morton challenges conventional notions of recovery—inhabiting canvases with images and objects from their journey through doctor visits and the everyday realities of living with chronic illness and gender dysphoria.

Interview by Logan Royce Beitmen

Your current solo exhibition at Olympia Gallery, Get Well, deals with psychological and physical issues you've had with your body, which you refer to as “unreliable.” What does it mean to have an unreliable body?

It means I don't take any body part for granted. Ever since I was little, I've had health issues. I was born with a leaky heart valve and a blood clotting disorder. I've had arthritis since high school. I can't remember a time before I had to listen to my body for how I needed to go about my day. So, a lot of it is about the act of mapping out your own world. I've always had to find my own path of understanding.

You tie that into your non-binary identity, as well. A lot of people accept their gender as kind of natural given, but it’s been more of a journey for you.

I definitely always knew I was trans and non-binary, but there wasn't a lot of language for it growing up. I'm not that old, but I'm also not that young. There have been a lot of shifts in language in the way we think about what it is to be alive and how our bodies and our feelings fit both into ourselves and into society. I think a lot of my work is trying to express the soup that we live in.

*IAMTRANS*, 2024, Oil, printed satin, laser prints, lego, rope bows on canvas, 72 x 66 x 1.5 in (182.9 x 167.6 x 3.8 cm)

Sometimes we don't know we have an issue with our body until we see it expressed by someone else. I only learned what bunions are—and that I have one—after reading the press release for your show.

Seriously, the best response to my work ever!

Tell me about your bunionectomy.

I've always had bunions. I can't remember a time before I had them. At the same time, I kind of ignored it. Like yes, they're painful, but it’s a pain I put up with. Then one day, it just felt like I was being stabbed internally, and I couldn't go about my daily life. So, I went to a couple different doctors. That's actually a big thing in the work, that doctors don't always believe you when you say something hurts. Even when you have the language for it, there's skepticism.

Eventually, I found a doctor who did imaging and said, “Well, your bone's super spiky. You are in fact being stabbed internally.” This particular surgery involved not only shaving down the bunion bone but also reshaping my foot entirely.

*Get Well*, 2024, Oil, “Get Well” balloon, hand-sewn sequin patches, kn95 mask, fibers, resin, notions on canvas, 60 x 54 x 2 in (152.4 x 137.2 x 5.1 cm)

What's remarkable is that you take the pain you've experienced, physical and emotional pain, and somehow transmute it into beauty. You have images of feet in your work, but they're made of sequins. Do you see art as something healing?

That's a really good question. I do. It is absolutely healing. I've been bedbound for huge chunks of time for different either chronic illnesses or accidents or other things that caused my body to need to be static for a while. The first time it happened was a bicycle accident, and it felt like I'd been removed from the world. Then, each subsequent time I've been bedbound, I've found a different way of interacting with that time spent alone.

With this most recent bedbound experience, I skipped all the downtime and went straight to documenting it through photography and note-taking. Pain isn't something you can recall. That's one of our survival mechanisms. So, I started writing down any time I had a big pain and trying to describe it. I did the same thing in the painting Exam Shorts, Blue Large.

*EXAM SHORTS, BLUE LARGE*, 2024, Oil, underwear, medical equipment, exam shorts, shower leg protector, sequins, laser prints on canvas, 84 x 72 x 3 in (213.4 x 182.9 x 7.6 cm)

For those of us who haven't had the pleasure of wearing exam shorts, what are they exactly?

They’re something you change into for surgery. It's this scratchy, synthetic, paper-like material. Think of a dollar bill, how it's kind of cloth and kind of paper-like. It’s very uncomfortable. And the sizing isn't very specific, so you sort of get what you get. In that painting, I glued a lot of the items I came home from the hospital with after the bunionectomy. If you pull up the shorts on that painting, you can see the tag, which says EXAM SHORTS, BLUE LARGE in all caps, so you can find the title physically in the painting.

That’s the largest painting, at 84 by 72 inches, but there’s a lot of large work in the show, and a lot of it includes hand-sewn sequins, which is labor intensive. Was it a physical feat to make this work?

It was. Right after surgery, I was bedbound for a while, then I was wheelchair-bound, and then I was using my cane. So, the scale of the work really had to shift with the range I could reach and the amount of pain I could tolerate or how long my leg could be down, whether it was going to swell. And I had to inject myself with blood thinners daily to avoid having a stroke or a blood clot. So, the work I was making in recovery and after was determined by accessibility.

The nice thing about sequins is that it's labor intensive, but it can be done in bed. I had already planned out some pieces before the surgery and went and found whatever materials I would need ahead of time, because I knew I would want to be working while stuck in bed.

Some of the work deals with your bicycle accidents, including the oversized fiberglass helmet sculptures. Tell us about those pieces.

They're called Accident 1 and Accident 2. I only have the silliest bicycle accidents—I don't know how I'm so lucky! Actually, I do feel very lucky that I'm still here, that none of these things have killed me.

The first bicycle accident that's referenced in Accident 1—that's the helmet that's upside down, the hot pink one—in that case, it was a parking garage arm that hit me in the head. It looked really silly. Everyone saw me get hit in the head and laughed about it. It does feel very slapstick to have a giant piece of steel fall out of the sky and hit you in the head. Then, in the second accident, I was biking around Prospect Park on the loop, and an escaped house cat ran in front of my wheel. Of all the things you expect when you're biking around the loop at Prospect, it's not a house cat!

There are references to my bicycle accident in the painting Cane/Can, too. I called it Cane/Can, like the can-can dance. I was thinking of my cane doing this little spin, which also looks like the spokes of a bicycle wheel or a wheelchair wheel. And there are rainbow bike reflectors on that painting, which is kind of a nice gay pride moment. I have those rainbow reflectors on my bike wheels at all times.

It’s about visibility, in every sense. When I have my cane, I am visible. People see disability. When you have an assistive device, people treat you differently. The same with queerness. People don't necessarily read me as trans from the outside. Hence, the painting is very much about queer invisibility and invisible disability, and how to make these things visible.

*Accident 1*, 2024, Foam, aqua resin, spray paint, fiberglass, 15 x 17 x 22 in (38.1 x 43.2 x 55.9 cm)

*Accident 2*, 2024, Foam, aqua resin, spray paint, fiberglass, 15 x 17 x 22 in (38.1 x 43.2 x 55.9 cm)

When I look at Cane/Can, I do imagine a dancer twirling a cane, maybe Fred Astaire or someone in a cabaret, and there's a celebratory quality.

I was a competition tap dancer for 10 years. I danced in Las Vegas when I was in middle school.

Even with the bunions?

Yeah, early bunions. I had to stop when I got arthritis in high school. But Bob Fosse was a big part of my childhood, and Gene Kelly.

Cane/Can is really a love letter to my cane and relearning how to walk. When people see you in a wheelchair or people see you with a cane, their first response is, “Oh no, how soon till you can get out?” But I'm really excited to know that my cane is always there whenever I need it. Accessibility devices are just that. They're your friends, and they open doors.

*Cane/Can,* 2024, Oil, laser prints, Kn95 mask, bicycle spoke reflectors, graphite, fabric, leaf, window screening, mixed media on canvas, 84 x 66 x 1.75 in (213.4 x 167.6 x 4.4 cm)

This gets back to the exhibition title, “Get Well”. Wellness can look different to different people.

Absolutely. For example, I was born with a heart condition. There is no perfect starting place.

I spend a lot of time talking to doctors, if you can’t tell. I can't have a surgery without getting a sign-off from a cardiologist, a hematologist, an entire Rolodex of folks. I think there is a push and pull between talking about health stuff with a medical professional, talking about health stuff as a human, and talking about health stuff in art. For a lot of people, health stuff can be embarrassing. Normally, for me, I love talking about health issues, zero embarrassment. But recently, for me, one time the embarrassment reared its head was when I got my first hemorrhoid, and that was awful. It was not fun. A blood clot and prolapse, or whatever the words were. It was a new experience for me to feel some kind of shame about bodily issues, and I'm trying to talk about my hemorrhoid more to counteract that. We all go through these things. Shame has no place. And we learn by sharing and connecting. learning to embrace the embarrassment of it.

A lot of us get hemorrhoids, and it's not an unusual thing, but nobody talks about it.

I started feeling like a Babybel cheese. It felt like if someone grabbed a hold of the hemorrhoid, they could rip my entire skin off by just unwrapping me like a Babybel cheese. That's in my sketchbook. I have all these drawings and notes in my sketchbook from times of being bedbound. All these things no one really talks about. One time, I drew a little picture about how wiping blood and shit from myself felt like Christmas–red and green. Like a Christmas toilet. That kind of thing.

You bring a combination of humor and the grotesque and also empathy when dealing with these medical conditions that seem embarrassing. It feels freeing to talk about this stuff, doesn’t it?

I love when people share their medical stories with me. One of my favorite things about the past few years of my work is how much it helps me connect with people and find a shared medical community and queer community.

If you could go back in time and talk to yourself when you were a child, what advice would you give yourself?

I wasn't really allowed to be myself growing up. I think I would probably try to encourage a little bit more rebellion. I think embracing experimentation can be hard, and it's always a difficult road, but I've always been me. I used to feel very lonely. The Bay Area is theoretically very liberal, but—I don't know if it was the time when I was growing up, or if kids just always kind of suck—but homophobia definitely was alive and well, and there wasn't a lot of room to be your full self and have other people recognize and support that. I was a weird little kid.

A lot of us were weird little kids, and sometimes it takes years to become comfortable with who we are.

My advice would be, “Don’t let other people tell you who you are.” Other people want to tell you who you are at all times, and they don't actually know.

Get Well is up through October 5, 2024, at Olympia Gallery, 41 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002

Logan Royce Beitmen is a writer and curator.

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