fifty-eight

Last Wednesday I took a day off work to go and look at art. Nearly everyone in the office was away on a summer break, and I was feeling jealous. I took my holiday in June, and it feels very distant.

I went to see Pyschopomps, by the taxidermist Polly Morgan. A pyschopomp is a 'guide of souls' - the deities, spirits or angels responsible for leading souls to the afterlife. They appear in numerous cultures: Charon, Horus, Woden, the Grim Reaper; pyschopomps all. Nowadays, there is Oscar the cat, who lives in a nursing home and curls up with those about to die. His predictions have been so accurate that staff will now alert a patient's family when Oscar appears on a bed. What else could he be, but a pyschopomp?

Anyone who has visited a natural history museum will be aware of taxidermy, which recreates an image of life using the skin of a dead animal. Those museum exhibitions, with animals frozen still as if in photographs, posed on backgrounds meant to resemble their natural habitat, are oppositional to Morgan's work: she does not aim to create a fiction of natural life, as if to pretend the animal had not been deconstructed and treated and tanned and manipulated by human hands.

I love this piece. Looking at it gave me an intense feeling of motion sickness. It was not a mass of wings, but one bird circling and swooping; it felt like the bird itself was always moving just out of line of my vision, and all that was left was a flurry of wing. I'm very drawn to static objects that nonetheless seem full of potential and movement; it is so impressive, to be able to make something so energetic despite its physical stillness.

This feeling, of movement without movement itself, was also present in this piece.

The little finches are akin to Eadward Muybridge's work: both he and Morgan capture a series of single moments of movement, and compose them in a way that suggests motion.

I read a review that spoke of escape and transcendence with regard to the second piece: the birds are outside their cage, lifting it beyond this world to another. But they didn't seem free to me. They are not inside the cage, but its metal still reaches up and holds them. They wear it. It put me in mind of how we incorporate animals into our service: we place real birds in cages to lift our spirits with song; we create bird deities to lift our spirits from life to the land of the dead.