The 2020 Creative Residents

Carl Morgan
Creative Resident — February 2020

Carl is a native of Virginia, raised in the Chesapeake Bay coastal environment of blue crabs and shipbuilding. With a lifelong passion for science and for building things, he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. Following graduation, Carl married Doreen, a woman of superhuman patience who remains his wife of 49 years. Carl soon became a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying missions in the Vietnam War. During the bad old days of the Cold War, he served as an engineer in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Carl and Doreen moved to the Northwest in the 1970s and have been Bainbridge Island residents for 30 years, raising a family here.   Carl completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Washington in 1975, and subsequently spent a career putting Nature’s principles to work. In 1992, Carl became one of the five founders of a medical device company, Heartstream. The company pioneered easy-to-use automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), used to rapidly treat victims of cardiac arrest. These devices have since been employed to save tens of thousands of lives, and may be seen today installed in boxes around Winslow.

A lifetime as an engineer applying math and physics powerfully highlighted the crystalline and timeless beauty of the principles underpinning our physical existence. Following retirement in 2007, Carl has focused his energy on art that celebrates the underlying beauty of the math and science we humans use to describe nature. Each of his kinetic sculptures seeks to highlight a principle taken from Mother Nature’s recipe book for our physical world. His pieces seek to engage viewers with nature’s principles shown not for their practicality, but for the sense of wonder they inspire.

Carl will be in residence at Bloedel Reserve during the month of February 2020.

Art from Engineering

I enjoy putting metal into motion. Doing so can illustrate how a few simple physical principles of mechanics can combine into action of surprising complexity. Mathematics showed me that physics — Mother Nature’s recipe book for the world we live in — contains surprisingly few really basic principles.  The complex world we inhabit emerges from endless combinations of these relatively simple basics.

Math provided me one lens to explore the spare beauty and almost crystalline elegance of the physics underpinning our world. A complementary lens for understanding the world came through a lifetime of handling real objects — measuring, shaping and persuading materials to become what I wanted.  The processes of math and physical manipulation have become, for me, inseparable tools for really understanding physical nature. For most of my life, those tools were directed toward engineering — putting the beauty of physics to work in some useful way.

Now, I want to celebrate those physical principles themselves — those lifelong consistent and reliable friends — by showing them in action. Each piece starts from a mathematical exploration of some theme in the natural world.  After an idea emerges, the math then turns to design — planning to get objects arranged and moving in a way that illustrates the theme.  Finally, an array of tools comes to hand in the shop for cajoling metal to actually perform.

In every piece, I try to use mechanisms to highlight how spare and simple mechanical physical principles can combine to produce complex action, just like Mother Nature does on a much grander scale.  I hope Ma has as much fun as I do in the process.