Claire Morgan: haunting the periphery

"Here is the end of all things"
Thistle, seeds, bluebottles, a taxidermy barn owl, nylon, lead, acrylic
2011

London-based artist Claire Morgan's delicate sculptural installations presents a disturbing liminal point in time where the natural flow of life has been arrested in some way. Theorist Manuel Aguirre employs an understanding of the liminal as a defining feature in the Gothic novel. In his understanding, the effects of terror in the Gothic novel are due to the textual constitution of a threshold between the domain of rationality and the world of the 'Other', the 'Numinous'. This threshold, or 'limen', expands and become an unhomely space of its own in which the protagonists are caught up and subsequently attempt to escape.

In Morgan's work the suspended matter (from a taxidermy barn owl, thistle, seeds and other artificial materials) presents an ambitious appeal for an urgent renegotiation of our relationship to the earth. Petrified animals populate this liminal threshold, haunting the periphery of our familiar world with a measurable physical presence and stillness. Darren Ambrose (October, 2008) observed that in Morgan's works "the avatars from the closed realm of nature are brought into the visibility of our world and are coaxed into speaking our language". The viewer's engagement with nature is staged through a careful consideration of natural rhythms and cycles. The poetic installation has a strange balance between chaos, control, constraint, balance and geometric form.

Yasuaki Onishi: the ethereal Gothic.

Yasuaki Onishi is known for using 'humble materials' like plastic sheeting, dead branches, hot glue, cardboard boxes and urea, to create monumental installations that appears to float in space. The process, that the artist refers to as "casting the invisible", involves draping the plastic sheeting over stacked cardboard boxes, which are then later on removed to leave only their impressions. The process of 'reversing' the sculpture is the artist's meditation on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind. In "White landscape" (illustrated above), the suspended branches and ropes are covered with dripping hot glue. This effect creates new shapes imbued with a faint luminosity. The dripping glue creates a vertical line using gravity and it's shape is maintained as the glue temperature cools down with urea. 'Urea' is an organic chemical compound, and is essentially the waste produced by the body after metabolizing protein. In the second image the artist used black hot glue to create intricate 'spatial drawings'.