Considering the narratives and hierarchical systems through which we understand ourselves as distinct from the natural world, Claire Morgan’s practice questions ideas of fixed identity, division, and human exceptionalism. Intertwined is a recurring concern with mortality, grief and kinship, and an on-going curiosity about the nature of these experiences. In response, Morgan’s oeuvre, encompassing sculpture, installation, drawing and painting, frequently brings seemingly opposing states into proximity, blurring the thresholds between forms of being, and life and death.
Through accumulation, fragmentation, suspension, and repetition, Morgan makes tangible forms of violence and metamorphosis that might otherwise remain unseen. In Black Mass, the central artwork in the exhibition, which also bears the show’s title, thousands of fragments of black post-consumer plastic are threaded and suspended to create an amorphous, smoke-like structure, within which sits the small body of a tawny owl. Appearing to hover on the brink of movement, Black Mass evokes a haunting presence, oscillating between associations of death and rebirth. Synthetic waste and animal become part of the same suspended system, collapsing distinctions between the organic and manufactured, abstract and figurative, while bringing the consequences of human consumption into intimate proximity with another being.
In a destabilised world that is both enduring and on the verge of collapse, Morgan’s material encounters and precarious forms ask what might emerge when familiar divisions are allowed to dissolve. Rather than approaching boundaries as fixed, Morgan proposes that they are unstable and permeable spaces in which different bodies, histories, and forms of matter encounter and act upon one another. In this way, the seemingly unbending and divisive parameters we pose on the world become sites of exchange, transformation, and possibility.
