In near every regard, we are living in a deficit of wonder. Politically, technologically, environmentally, socially, we are bereft. And if genuine wonder does occur, the internet does a capricious job of consuming it and accelerating its journey to critical mass, only to bleach it of its original vibrancy. Through a very small interstice in this malaise comes Morgan Blue’s Featherbed. Adorned in cosmic codes and iconographies from a dreamscape out of time, the paintings in this exhibition arrive as light through a stain glass window.
Featherbed is wilfully and gleefully corny. Corny like a field of wildflowers is corny, corny like a cloudless night sky is corny, corny like flying a kite is corny. Featherbed abandons any inclination for posturing and submits to something honeyed. Sentiment is abundant, constraint absent. Here, cars race atop the rings of Jupiter, a lizard plays the horn, Snoopy takes a bubble bath. While there is an apparent absence of regularity or sameness from painting to painting, the works still come together in harmonious chorus. Laden with shared symbols, colour languages and numerology, Blue connects these works to each other and to us through fanciful scenes cast with characters you might encounter on a side quest inside a fever dream. In many of the works in Featherbed, there are paths to accession: ladders, climbing tree limbs, things that fly–dragons, UFOs, rocket ships, angels. These icons of levity, of escape, give the works a sense that something is afoot, that within each refracted space things are on the move. Looking into these worlds within worlds within worlds is not dissimilar to staring down the barrel of a kaleidoscope. Each painting arrives all at once, which is to say: there is no entry, no exit, no focal point that anchors attention. Rather, there is the sensation of floating across a fragmented night sky, a body rendered weightless.
Such brightly rendered fantastical dreamscapes seemingly have little morbidity to them, yet the artist declares this is in fact an exhibition about death. Her own, more precisely. This is not death as final act, but death as a project ongoing. Blue proposes that, in a body routinely and agonisingly excavated, there comes a frontier where suffering and reverence co-inhabit, were pain can be relearned as sensation rather than as stranger. ‘Radical optimism’ and ‘radical acceptance’ have become sticky and sloganised, laboured terms said loudly to distract from the fact that they mean very little. Featherbed makes no attempt to step in with to these rallying cries in order to confront this issue of mortality. It is an exercise in surrender. It is the suggestion that neutrality to one’s own death is not a passive state but a receptive one. Though these are works delivered at a high frequency through their technicolour visage, they are don’t descend into chaos or leave the viewer restless. They are a quiet prompt, a call to sit in something akin to tenderness, to let the world arrive at the same time you do.
Standing in the morning sun shafts of her studio, Blue posits that there are no good paintings or bad paintings, only true paintings. As an ethos for art practice, this is a substantial offering. Values of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are obsolete. Truth alone has foothold. An important proposition exists here: the world is built in binaries (good and bad; real and unreal; pain and freedom from pain) but the truth exists in-between. If we accept this of our world, that all things are in opposition with each other, then what opposition do we encounter when we stand from the viewpoint of Featherbed? What is the opposite of death? The opposite of death is not life. The opposite of death is stasis. It goes to follow that the truth that lies between is the one held within the body. The body is the point of convergence, the pivot, the suture between worlds. Morgan Blue’s Featherbed resists stasis and places the world within and surrounding the body in motion. Together we travel the meandering middle path, through forests at twilight, through ancient caves lit by supermarket birthday candles, through celestial junkyards with cars speeding over the arch of a rainbow. Death travels with us, at an indetermined distance. He is in no hurry, and neither are we.
- Claire Summers
