I’m absolutely in love with anything involving suspended motion, the more obsessively detailed the better. One artist I particularly enjoy is British artist Claire Morgan. What intrigues me about Claire is not only the amazingly beautiful creations she makes out of an insane amount of small suspended objects that can be as difficult to work with as that fluff that flies out of dandelions but that she introduces taxidermy to her pieces which is rather odd – but I love it. The thought of putting things like dead crows or fruit flies into a sculpture can seem grotesque and yet her creations are anything but.

In the artists words:

My 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. For me, creating seemingly solid structures or forms from thousands of individually suspended elements has a direct relation with my experience of these forces. There is a sense of fragility and a lack of solidity that carries through all the sculptures. I feel as if they are somewhere between movement and stillness, and thus in possession of a certain energy.

The way Claire artfully freezes time is one part of what makes these pieces so engaging but I’m especially drawn by these completely fabricated scenes that are inspired by nature and contain elements of form or movement that we are familiar with and yet she puts her own spin on them in a way that pulls them completely out of reality. Like the above image from her 2011 collection titled, “Gone To Seed”, she creates the shape of a dandelion that has begun to release that signature fluff and is in the middle of expansion when a crow falls through the middle, splitting the form in two. The forms are natural and yet the scale and interaction between the crow and the dandelion are completely impossible.

While You Were Sleeping, 2009

Clearing, 2009

Tracing Time, 2007

Here is the End of All Things, 2011

Claire has also begun drawing and exploring the two-dimensional world on paper. She begins by using paper which includes actual residue of the taxidermy process and refers to them as Blood Drawings. Below is Monumental from her 2011 drawings.

Down Time, 2011

images via Claire Morgan