Claire Morgan

From the far side of the gallery, Architecture, 2009, one of Claire Morgan’s suspended installations, almost disappears into thin air. From a grate of clear acrylic dowels on the ceiling hang rows of nylon fishing line, threaded through the minuscule bodies of hundreds of dead fruit flies in exact planes that stack up to form intersecting architectural rectangles nine feet high. Above and below the rectangles, a few flies break away along the threads, either dissipating from or coalescing into their cubic swarm, a ghostly mapping of the unknowable or unseeable geometry of animal behavior. This combination of meticulous perfection and organic movement, of stasis and irruption, runs through each of the Belfast-born artist’s installations, populated by hovering protagonists from the natural world. In Silver Lining, 2009, instead of gnats, Morgan has beaded her suspended nylon-line grid with individual thistle and dandelion spores. At the top of this precision-woven geometry of organic dust in space, a menacing owl; tumbling through the bottom, a splayed rat.

In addition to these staged narrative dramas, Morgan’s first solo show in France is particularly noteworthy for the formal drama among the nine installations themselves and the related works on paper. Morgan carries out the taxidermy of her animal subjects, slicing, skinning the carcasses of a hedgehog, a pigeon, an owl, spilling blood and preservative chemicals on top of watercolor paper like an operating table. She then draws her crisp architectural plans on that paper alongside the traces of the taxidermic process. To see the guts and the grid, the muck of the process and its imagined completion on paper, and then to hope to find the drawing materialized in the next room, the thousand spores shivering on their threads as projected, is truly a study in suspense.