Artists

Hannah Morgan

Press release

Wet Mausoleum Imagine you were a monuments guy, a needle-carved-from-a-single-piece-of-granite guy, an emperor’s-marble-forelock guy, a mausoleum guy. The kind of person who thought stone meant forever. Imagine you once spent a week in Rome, and when you looked at the columns and the busts you thought that these were made by the cleverest artists of all, because they had chosen a material that lasted. The glass blowers, the wood carvers, where was their work now? Forgotten, that’s where. Cracked into billions of tiny shards, washed away, burnt to a cinder, rotted back into the earth. If you analysed your feelings towards stone (something you had admittedly never done), they would speak to a deep-rooted fear of your own insignificance for which the promise of legacy was a balm. You certainly did not want to see yourself as a droplet of spray in a great ocean, a tiny form thrown upwards from the water, momentarily assuming the appearance of an individual entity before returning to the wave from which you came. This was not for you. Instead you preferred to conceive of yourself as solid, singular, impervious, unmoved and unchanged by the unending flux of the world. With all this in mind, imagine that one day you were sitting on a busy train beside an artist and her friend. It soon transpired that the artist worked with stone, which naturally pleased you, as you often lamented how few people applied themselves to the mastery of traditional art forms. The artist had recently visited a mine to collect alabaster, a mine where both gypsum and alabaster were present, both deriving from ancient seabeds, sharing an identical chemical make-up and emerging in adjacent seams. You listened as she described the appeal of alabaster, the way it changes according to touch and atmosphere, how it was used by sculptors in the Middle Ages for its uncanny affinity with human flesh, how its veins and capacity to bruise is a link between the earth, the human and the divine. Her carving technique was intuitive, she said, she made no sketches and instead followed the stone, discovering where it wanted to be carved, what it resisted and permitted. Imagine that on the balance of things you were enjoying this conversation (although you really thought an artist should impose their vision on a material rather than be dictated to by it). But it all took a turn for the worse when the artist began speaking about wetness: oozing orifices, cum and breast milk, sweaty limbs melding together on dance floors, moisture as the thing that linked all life and matter, coursing through everything from rocks and mines to clouds and our own wet passageways. Imagine at this point you wished you had chosen a different seat, but the train was full and you were stuck. Soon the artist turned her attention to another type of stone she had found while she was down the mine: anhydrite. This stone, she said, had an extraordinary ability to shape shift. Once it came in contact with water it transformed into gypsum, losing its hard, crystalline qualities and turning white and chalky. Wetness was the key, and for an exhibition she was making she had collected both water and anhydrite from the same mine to bring this transformation to life. Imagine, before you left the train, that you heard the artist mention the location of this exhibition. While at the time you had no intention at all of going, a month later you found yourself walking in to the gallery. Before you was a metal structure. On top and underneath this structure were pieces of anhydrite carved into rolling curves like some sort of alien, hyper-mobile limbs, the blue-grey hue of the stone covered in a web of veins the colour of old blood. Water seeped on to these carvings, and as you peered at them you noticed that their surfaces had begun to change, their smoothness turning powdery. You wandered around the room feeling unnerved, until you found yourself staring at a wafer thin piece of stone, stone so thin you could snap it between your fingers, stone that would not stand the test of time but would instead one day be crushed into nothingness, with a carving on its surface that seemed to taunt you, appearing as it did like some sort of peculiar amoeba or water sprite. You left in a hurry, and upon arriving home took comfort in the solid stone from which your own house was built. But that night, ensconced in your stone house, you had a vision. A large torrent of water poured down from the sky, and when it hit your home the walls dissolved into powder leaving behind a great cavity in the ground. As the water hit you also transformed. Your orifices began leaking minerals, your nipples became waterfalls, your eyeballs slipped from their sockets, until the definite edges that set you apart from the rest of the world were washed away and you were nothing more than a fleshy wet tube, a hungry and horny fleshy wet tube ingesting and expelling and mingling with the world around you. You saw this monstrous dripping entity that was you crawling into the hole in the ground where your house once stood, slurping up the chalky residue as it made its way down, rubbing its veins over the veins of rocks, bruising and being bruised in return, until in the wet depths of the earth it collapsed in ecstasy, no longer distinguishable from the ancient sea bed, just another pile of moist feral biomatter ready to transform again. Text above by Rosanna McLaughlin In this presentation of new work Morgan continues to venture underground. Sypen interrogates ideas of pilgrimage, medieval apocalyptic narratives, beasts residing in the dark, liquid hauntology, feral landscapes, leaking intertwined bodies and muddy punctuations. In her research of extracted matter at the periphery of a mine, she turns her attention to Anhydrite and water. The two seem oppositional - Anhydrite, means ‘no water’ - yet there is alchemy present. On contact with one another the stone begins a chemical change - the surface morphing and cracking over time becoming gypsum. For Morgan this vulnerability in material shifted ideas of monument as a fixed intention of sculptural form. Reflecting the instability of the time we're in she plays with slippages between industrial landscapes, personal labour, mourning, and collapsible matter - both material and imagined. Instability knowingly weaves through the presentation. Nestled in the wall niche, Signacula ii, a rotating piece of etched satin spar collected at the bank of the water source. As with its namesake in the main structure it is an archive of the various journeys made underground, a pilgrim badge of sorts. Slowly turning to reveal and conceal an image of twisted sinews, the fragility revealing an absurdity; it belongs framed, held, preserved not exposed. A stainless steel structure floating on oak beams seems on the brink of being dismantled like a roaming reliquary or museological display. It houses carved blue Anhydrite, blown glass, fragments of etched satin spar and mine water. Webbed in material meaning. The precariously hung etching, reproduced from a photograph at the source, is a label of the work, the artists way of cataloguing. Below, the main carvings fold in on themselves and spill out of the structure echoing the stone's colloquial name, ‘bowel stone’. The carved folds contort just as the roof structure underground does; pushing out twisted, monstrous, mushrooming seams. Water from the underearth source is held in hand-blown glass vessels ampullae ii &iii, based on morphing cell structures. These vessels intermittently drip onto the stone: threatening, leaking. This is the beginning of erosion. A proposition of change and volatility, a promise of transfiguring through watery contamination. Sypen collects material language of under-earth feral movements. Materials that both betray and coexist, matter that is reliability in flux. Stone, water, alchemy: a pilgrimage to the source.