23 Oct 2012

'Claire Morgan: Gone to Seed' at the MAC, Belfast

Claire Morgan's sculptural work is about our relationship with the rest of nature, explored through notions of change, the passing of time, and the transience of everything around us. She creates seemingly solid structures from thousands of individually suspended elements, which have a direct relationship to nature.

Both flora and fauna have been present in many of Morgan's recent installations. In 'Gone to Seed', we encounter what seems to be a controlled cloud of seed heads, frozen in the wind and rearranged into an orb-like structure. This form has then been fractured and split by a crow plunging through its mass, but much like the seed heads has also been frozen in time just before impacting with the gallery floor.

Within this work, a broad exploration of mankind's control over and relationship with nature is presented in an enchantingly beautiful display.

'The processes involved in the work are laborious and there are thousands of individual elements involved, but clarity of form is of high importance. I do not wish the animals to provide a narrative, but rather to introduce an element of movement, or energy, or some sort of reality; animating or interacting with the larger architectural forms.'

The titles of Morgan's works are important, and often make reference to historical or popular culture. Words are taken from the titles of films and books, or phrases of colloquial slang. These connections often add a comedic element, a sense of irony or bluntness that keeps the work firmly rooted in the experience of the world in which we humans inhabit.

Claire Morgan was born in Belfast in 1980. She graduated in 2003 with a first class degree in sculpture and has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions in the UK and Europe and museum shows in the US and Australia.