Claire Morgan FRSS

"Humans are animals. Our intellectual dislocation from the landscape that sustains us is fuelled by the narratives we construct to distance ourselves from mortality and natural cycles. We behave as individual entities with fixed identities, but the reality is less clear. I am intrigued by those simultaneous senses of spiritual communion and unpalatable intrusion that come about through awareness of our connectedness, and of our vulnerability.

My broader exploration is of memory, grief and kinship, and the way that stories can shape identity. I use formal and material means to probe the inherent violence of the patriarchal, colonial systems that form so much of the basis of contemporary life. This has a cathartic function and slows that violence down, drawing from it a strange power and transformative potential.

There is a desperate need to reimagine the relationships humans have with other species and with the planet. I want to delve into places where divisions blur between history and nature, the personal and the political. A boundary is not merely a dividing line, but a point where a transfer of energy might occur. The possibility of a spark."

Claire Morgan's international exhibition history spans 20 years and includes museum shows in Europe, Asia, Australia and the States. Solo shows include Hold me tightly lest I fall, State Gallery of Lower Austria (Krems AT, 2024), Joy in the Pain, Saarlandmuseum Moderne Galerie (Saarbrücken DE, 2021), As I Live and Breathe, The Horniman Museum (London GB, 2019), Stop Me Feeling, Frist Art Museum (Nashville US, 2017).

Works have featured in group exhibitions at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, IT; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, US; MONA, Tasmania, AU; MoCA, Busan, KO; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz AT; Towner, Eastbourne, UK; Château d’Oiron, Oiron, FR; La Casa Encendida, Madrid, ES; Langen Foundation, DE.

Morgan was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2024. She was awarded a Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant in 2022 and won the Fondation Guerlain Drawing Prize in 2019. Works are in collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Fondation Guerlain, and MONA. In 2022, Claire Morgan and Catherine Bertola founded Hypha, a supportive and critically engaged community of women artists based in the North East of England.