If life hangs by a thread, it’s death that Claire Morgan hangs by its threads – the same threads that, trimmed with bird skins, make up her latest mobile entitled Song.
A playful title for a funereal work with the allure of a memento mori: a garland of dead birds as ravishing as it is terrifying. “I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead”: this is the title of Claire Morgan’s new exhibition at Galerie Karsten Greve (in Paris after “Cologne”) 1. It contains all the poetry and delicacy of the latest works by this Irish artist, who never ceases to speak of “our vulnerability” and “our own unease at the impermanence of everything in life.
Wreathed in dead birds, like a prophetess of “the era of mass extinction we are entering”, the naked, already bloodless woman enthroned at the centre of her installation. The inevitable heat death of the universe appears as a veritable allegory of destruction. In other works, the same naked woman, modelled in wax or drawn in pastel, appears clothed in a protective, regenerating fox skin: with Claire Morgan, the boundary between death and life is always tenuous. A troubling closeness at work in her latest drawings, mixing watercolour and pencil with the bodily fluids recovered during the taxidermy process…
1. This is also the title of the illustrated book in the exhibition, made of seven drawings and two handwritten texts forming a dialogue between a living woman and a dead fox.
Till January 6th
Galerie Karsten Greve
5, rue Debelleyme, Paris III
galerie-karsten-greve.com