ART CITIES:Paris-Claire Morgan
Claire Morgan’s fragile hanging installations reflect her interest in natural processes and organic materials. In her works, the artist engages with the elemental conditions of man in his habitat and reveals the impossibility of grasping the complexity of life and death: “Exploring the physicality of animals, death, and illusions of permanence in the work is my way of trying to come to terms with these things myself”. Elegance and beauty, but also senselessness and horror, are present in her installations and drawings. Simultaneously poetic and vexing, they express the ambivalence of life.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve
After showing at Palais de Tokyo and Fiac in 2009, Claire Morgan unveiled her first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Karsten Greve. Now the artist at the same Gallery presents “Perpetually at the Centre”. Claire Morgan’s work explores the ambivalence in the human being’s relationship with the natural world that surrounds him/her. The artist’s reflections on the human presence in the world, which has resulted in the progressive destruction of our natural environment, are externalised in her installations using taxidermy animals that appear to be inhabiting and adapting to a world of superficial post-consumer waste that engulfs them. It was contemplations about the power of nature, as well as an exploration of the self, ego and mortality, that bore this exhibition. The vastness of the sea, wild forests and the night all manifest as an abyss or the fear of the unknown, a subject meditated upon until it has become rather a metaphor for life itself, and reveals the vulnerability of humankind. This thought process does indeed take into account the on-going tragic events that we see on a near-daily basis. From the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean where, for thousands of migrants, the sea can move from vector of hope to tomb, to the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower where people saw their homes transformed into a hellish vision, to the increasing occurrence of extreme weather that surely predicts environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. The works also symbolise the artist’s private battles, attesting to her awareness of her own passions. For Claire Morgan, the will that each one of us has to exist is strongly linked to both the passion and violence that we use to express our primal needs. This struggle, be it physical or psychological, is part of our private landscape and it engenders contradictions in our consciousness. These concerns have guided the way the exhibition is organised, unfolding accordingly in specific pairs of ideas: the self and violence; the passage of time and transcendence; the fear of darkness and drowning; fire and death. The very principle of taxidermy, which Claire Morgan carries out with her own hands, lies in the contradictory act of striving to give the appearance of life to something that is dead. This ambivalence is a characteristic of all of her work: in her drawings, as in her paintings, the residue of the taxidermy procedure itself becomes material for graphic expression. Elements such as bones and bodily fluids, and, for the first time, animals, are integrated into the works, whilst affording them a symbolic, ritualistic quality.
Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 14/10-23/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
