Claire Morgan FRSS

My practice is focused on how we humans understand and interact with the rest of the natural world. I look at humans as animals, and the complexity of our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us. My environmental and social concerns have always been fundamental to my practice, particularly the superficially passive role we often choose to assume - our reluctance to accept our own culpability. The social and psychological toll our culture can take on us as individuals and as animals is profound. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear. The me that I was a few days ago no longer exists.

My most recent works are explorations of vulnerability, of history, of memory - both personal and collective - and of violence - inflicted and received. They have to do with the old patriarchal and colonial systems that seem to keep resurfacing, even internally. They are about what I am hiding, and what I am hiding from. They probe violence through formal and material means. They have a cathartic function, and seem to slow that violence down, arrest it, and draw from it a strange power, and the possibility of renewal. They leave me feeling vulnerable, but that feels entirely necessary.

Claire Morgan was born in Belfast, and lives in Gateshead, UK. Prizes include the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (2022), Fondation Guerlain Prix de Dessin (2019), the Premio Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro (2006), and the RSS Annual Bursary Award (2004). Solo shows include I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead, Galerie Karsten Greve (Cologne, 2023), Joy in the Pain, Saarlandmuseum Moderne Galerie (Saarbrücken, 2021), As I Live and Breathe, The Horniman Museum (London 2019), Stop Me Feeling, Frist Art Museum (Nashville, 2017), The Sound of Silence, Het Noordbrabants Museum (Den Bosch, 2016), The Gathering Dusk, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris, 2015).

Recent exhibitions include I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris (FR) 04.11.2023 - 06.01.24 and SEISMIC: Art Meets Science, GIANT Gallery, Bournemouth (UK) 28.10.23 - 20.01.24.