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.
Perhaps inspired by the most recent holiday and the fireworks show I witnessed down on Lake Union, as seen in the above photo I took from the new South Lake Union Park, I have been looking at a lot of imagery related to displays of light and the actions of electricity. However, it’s not the overall display that has caught my attention but rather the details.
Some of the most intriguing imagery is that of Hiroshi Sugimoto in his project titled Lighting Fields. The artists description of this project:
The word electricity is thought to derive from the ancient Greek elektron, meaning “amber.” When subject to friction, materials such as amber and fur produce an effect that we now know as static electricity. Related phenomena were studied in the eighteenth century, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. To test his theory that lightning is electricity, in 1752 Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm. He conducted the experiment at great danger to himself; in fact, other researchers were electrocuted while conducting similar experiments. He not only proved his hypothesis, but also that electricity has positive and negative charges.
In 1831, Michael Faraday’s formulation of the law of electromagnetic induction led to the invention of electric generators and transformers, which dramatically changed the quality of human life. Far less well-known is that Faraday’s colleague, William Fox Talbot, was the father of calotype photography. Fox Talbot’s momentous discovery of the photosensitive properties of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging. The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.
The images take on an interesting quality that exhibit the characteristsics of such things as water, land and vegetation – painted with brushes of light. The intricacies are amazing with softer areas that look like hair or grassy hills with bright points of light sprouting into trees. Simply stunning.
I recently came acros an old article from Environmental Graffiti about the glow worm, a sophisticated cave-dwelling predator that creates an elegant, glowing landscape that lures in its prey. This reminded me of a a rather old project out of Athens, Greece that I thought to be quite lovely. The temporary, interactive urban installation was called White Noise White Light and was installed as one of nine installations during the 2004 Olympics and was sited at the base of the Acropolis which provided quite a stunning backdrop.
I don’t think the designers at Howeler + Yoon Architecture actually used the glow worm as their muse but nevertheless, there is a fascinating connection in form and somewhat in function as well. People are drawn in by points of light light like a moth to a flame but instead of being snared, the light brightens and moves as they pass through the sea of fiber-optic stalks. The movement produces a visual flow of light and at the same time activates a tiny hidden speaker.
From the designers, “Comprised of a 50′x50′ grid of fiber optics and speakers, ‘White Noise / White Light’ is an interactive sound and light field that responds to the movement of people as they walk through it. What appears at first to be a static, neutral and transparent grid of vertical markers dissolves into a luminous sound-scape by night. As pedestrians enter into the fiber optic field their presence and movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LED’s and white noise from speakers below. Just as white light is made of the full spectrum of color, white noise contains every frequency within the range of hearing in equal amounts. If motion is detected, the white LED illumination grows brighter while the white noise increases in volum. Once motion is no longer detected, the light and sound fade into dimness and silence.”
