Claire Morgan

I’ve always drawn animals as part of the taxidermy. Before you take an animal apart, you need to take down its measurements. Generally, I lie it down on a page of paper and draw its outline, measuring things like the distance from the tip of the nose to where the eye starts and ends. This enables me to reconstruct an accurate body when its skin is put back on. I became really interested in the marks that were left on the page by accident, like blood, mud or claw scratches. I started using them as a starting point for my drawings and introduced geometric forms that were related to my sculptures. I also put carbon on the animal’s fur in order to create prominent marks as I manipulated its body on the paper. There’s a dialogue between what the body would have done naturally and the direction I’m trying to push it in. The drawings were initially preparatory but began getting bigger; now they are completely separate from the sculpture.

I envisioned an animal hanging onto this block by its teeth and for it to be unclear whether it’s hanging on for safety or attacking or moving, or perhaps it’s something more abstract. It’s like the tension between the two extremes of beauty and violence and trying to find a balance. In the studio, I had a frozen roadkill fox that I hung from the ceiling. Then I photographed and filmed it rotating while it was suspended. Later, I moved its body onto the surface of the paper, trying to explore how its spinning movements had happened. The scratches are from the fox’s paws and there’s the imprint of where his tail, which I’d dipped in carbon, splashed onto it.

Foxes exist on the periphery of the synthetic, rectangular environments we’ve made for ourselves and the wilder, untamed world. They’re incredibly beautiful and I feel a connection with them somehow: they embody something wild, untameable, intuitive, visceral, maybe even carnal.

A lot of people know what I do, so if they find a dead animal in the road or if their pet kills something, they bring it to me or call me about it. Other taxidermists also exchange with me and my five cats bring me mice and rats. I have four freezers of dead animals: a badger, some foxes, squirrels, a lot of mice and rats, and garden birds and tropical birds.

I’m showing four sculptures each involving an animal that’s a resident of London: a fox, a grey squirrel, a crow and a parakeet that are all regarded as pest species. They’re connected by their mouths to cones made out of black plastic fragments. In the atrium, there’s a large installation [of three spherical forms] made from multi-coloured polythene fragments of used shopping bags.

I’m concerned with environmental needs and waste as a symptom of our growing greed for things, which is a fundamental problem in our society. We want to pretend that we’re immortal; surrounding ourselves with more and more possessions is related to our unwillingness to confront the reality that we’re animals and are going to die. But I’m not trying to tell anyone a specific, political message. It’s more a case of asking myself questions and exploring things that scare me.