Morgan Hardigree is a Lexington, Kentucky based interdisciplinary artist working in color pencil, printmaking, jewelry-making, and assemblage. Completing her BA in Art History and Studio Art at Transylvania University in May of 2025, she loves the surreal and uses memories, her own poems, movies, and found objects as inspiration for her practice that centers trans-femininity and queerness. Her writing and art has been published in both the Rambler and the Transylvanian, and she has presented her art historical research at SECAC’s 2024 and 2025 conferences. Hardigree has participated in group shows in Transylvania University’s Morlan Gallery, the Shearer Student Gallery, LexArts, and the Loudoun House along with staging and curating her recent solo show Centipede Circling the Sun. Currently, Hardigree is part of 2ndStory gallery’s 2025 Bridgework cohort, a residency program highlighting emerging artists in partnership with the Lexington Art League, Plum Blossom Initiative, and the Art and Lit Lab.

I am a multimedia artist working primarily in color pencil, printmaking, and assemblage. I use art as identity-formation, cherishing the hours spent mark-making and sourcing ribbon, metal, and other found materials as an extension of my beloved practice of collecting everything I can. Some of my earliest memories were watching my father paint tabletop miniatures, imagining their stories and taking breaks to watch superhero TV shows and high fantasy movies, diving into expansive worlds all the while not recognizing my own trans identity or the ostracization my femininity garnered from peers at school. It was here that I began my first collections, using old protein powder jars and shoeboxes to store anything I thought was cool or interesting, from rocks to gems from Mammoth Cave field trips, Pokémon cards, tiny action figures, and an expansive collection of legos I would deconstruct, making my own characters and universe inspired from my favorite pieces of media.

My art-making extends this process of collecting to my own built world, “The Wasteland That Lies Before,” an internal and surrealistic universe representing the path I saw for myself if I never transitioned. Constantly changing, the wasteland manifests a prescribed path given to me from birth breaking down and twisting as it faces my transness and will to follow my own way. In the wasteland memories collage, from the chain-link fence keeping my elementary-school safe from the woods beyond to nights spent watching the Kentucky landscape beyond my car window, where I would call friends over the summer so my grandparents couldn’t hear through the thin walls of their house. Coupled with my love for the queerness of camp and my affinity for body horror, which I find similarities to the subtle and overt horror queer people face in our daily lives, the wasteland parallels the surrealistic tendency to look inward to find truth and the drive to persist through hardship.