Made of soap: © Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view of vases made of soap, on display at Haunch of Venison, London. Photo: Kisa Lala

One thing made clear during the recent Japanese deluge was that the earth does not discriminate, and all human-made objects were equally subject to the forces of destruction. The substances we choose to build with are measured in reference to human scale: Objects are hard enough only to withstand our own needs for toughness. They are as tall, soft or as resilient enough to meet only our own standards for what is optimum. Though we may build things to last several human lifetimes, they are ephemeral gestures in time as demonstrated by the waves that washed away, with a mere tide-swing of the pendulum, centuries of human toil.

The Korean artist Meekyoung Shin mimics precious Chinese porcelain vases and vaunted classical sculptures – and remodels them out of soap. Her replicas seem to mock the value of the original and their illusion of authenticity. Everything pictured is made of soap…

Sculptures in Greek style made of soap © Meekyoung Shin 2011, 'Translation', installation view, Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Ghost Series, © Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view, Soap Vases on display at Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Soaps vases, 'Ghost Series', © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

© Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view, Soap Vases on display at Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Kouros, Installation View © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Kouros, all slightly weathered and dissolved - Installation View © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Chinese porcelain vases are fragile to begin with, and this is intrinsic to their value. Porcelain and glass at least have the illusion of stability, giving collectors who covet them a chance to gamble on their potential for eternity. Shin also models Kouros, and other classical Greek sculptures out of soap. The translucent quality of soap can be made to resemble marble or coloured glass. Soap, a substance so commonly used in households, is associated in our minds with catabolism, solubility, breaking down…not as a building tool of permanence.

Buddhas made of soaps © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Buddhas made of Soaps, Buddhas made of soaps © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Meekyoung Shin’s Buddha soap statuettes were lent to hotels for use in their washrooms temporarily. Displayed in cabinets, in their semi-dissolved states, they seem to emphasize the precept that all things must pass…as is often symbolized by the Buddhist construction of elaborate mandalas that remain vulnerable to erasure by the wind.

No doubt porcelain is susceptible to earthquakes and soap to tsunamis, but under radiation they will probably have far more longevity than humans.

Meekyoung Shin, 16 Feb – 2 Apr Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, London UK.

Patricia Piccinini - Balasana - 2009 - Silicone, fiberglass, human hair, clothing, Red-necked Wallaby, rug

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s silicone rendered mutants are on display at Haunch of Venison in New York. Piccinini, in her mid-40’s, offers to lead me through her show describing the myriad creatures that populate her post-human world.

Patricia Piccinini The Observer 2010 - silicone, fibreglass, steel, human hair, clothing, chairs

The first installation in the gallery titled, The Observer, is of a child tipped over a stack of Ikea chairs curving in a centipede-like spine.

“We’ve created this precarious environment, an ecology for our children built of these mass produced goods…and we’ve placed our children in this space, and they are just observing,” says Piccinini. Though the child is not in immediate danger the work seems to ponder the possibilities of the outcome. “It’s talking about balances,” suggests Piccinini.

Her silicone and fibre-glass creations have human hair on their painted skin-like veneers, punched in one at a time by hand. To create life-like creatures with blushed skin tones that give them the verisimilitude of real skin, she employs a team of eight specialized apprentices at her studio in Melbourne.

“The germ for Cascade,” she says, showing me a work hanging on the wall “came from me being pissed off with images of women where they are sexualized – but in a homogenous way.” The sexualization of women, she felt, rarely encompassed their fertility or fecundity. In this piece the hummingbird appears to be pollinating the growth of hair flowering at the women’s pudenda. “It’s pulling at this – symbol for fertility, [it is about] lushness and beauty,” says Piccinini, describing it as a metaphor for the weaving and embroidery traditionally associated with women.

Patricia Piccinini Cascade 2010 - silicone, fibreglass, human hair

Patricia Piccinini, Litter - 2010 silicone, fibreglass, steel, fox fur

So far the show is grounded in the real, but the rest takes us into the fantastic possibility of creatures formed from an alchemical blend of nature and technology. Describing a litter of three transgenic babies (Litter, a play on ‘garbage’), she remarks, “Here, this nature has become technologized. These are all natural forms. There are canine, simian and human forms in here, but put together in a technological way to make a new creature.”

Patricia Piccinini The Stags 2008

In The Stags we see a couple of dueling Vespa scooters (skilfully molded by an automotive modeler) transmogrified into deers: machines behaving as animals. Here Piccinini portends the naturalization of technology. “Same idea but flipped. Same world and the relationship to technology but different sides,” says Piccinini.

“Machines are taking over a lot of responsibilities – my children are playing a lot more with computers than trees. This is an idea that they could be a natural force – and that they are fighting and autonomous scares us; something we can’t control might not be so positive.”

To support this extrapolation into the future, Piccinini offers that we are already disassembling what it means to be human, “My computer has a personality; I can talk to my car.”

I tell her I feel less akin to these magical stags than the babies: They are more machine than nature. Piccinini explores our sense of empathy and tests the degree to which we can relate to the ‘other,’ by betraying our innate tribal, familial instincts that bind us to our own race, colour, species. The vulnerability of children and the device of using anthropomorphized creatures, push at our boundaries of acceptance of things that appear alien.

Even as the artworks probe the limits of our most primitive ethnocentric biases, they affirm our place on the planet as the dominant species – having the power to discriminate over other life forms. Piccinini seems to be laying a moral path for our responsibility towards our medical creations. And yet, we are unable to even ensure the existence of creatures that already exist on the planet, so this scenario seems to me rather a distant future. “You can’t talk about nature today unless you talk about extinction,” she says about the accelerating pace of change, “that wouldn’t have happened thirty years ago – this is a recent thing.”

Patricia Piccinini -The Young Family 2002-3 - shown at Venice Biennale 2003, Courtesy of Artist

There are a lot of children depicted in the show, and she uses them as a device to elicit emotion. I ask if she is inspired by children’s stories.

“I have children now, and have renewed respect for Dr. Seuss,” she says. “There are children in my work because they have no prejudice and they bring out the best in us. Why would you change nature/have artificial nature – I make these creatures because I want people to engage with them, empathize with them, pick them up.”

Indeed her creatures appear monstrous but cuddlesome. Monster, she reminds me is a medical term. Teratology is the study of monsters. “I don’t want to shock people because that stops them from thinking.” When we reference the Chapman Brothers in conversation, and suggest that her work is more ‘feminine,’ she says, “I love them, but I don’t want my work to be sensational. I want my work to be loved and embraced. I feel therefore I think.”

Patricia Piccinini sitting beside her artwork The Comforter 2010. photo: Kisa Lala

In The Comforter, a hirsute woman (an actual genetic condition that led to the bearded lady once popular in freak-shows and French courts), cradles an eyeless creature conceived of as an udder with a large mouth. The mouth is needy, but also a sensuous organ of expression. In this, the maternal instinct of the ‘woman’ is celebrated without prejudice. The woman loves this grotesque creature because it is her own.

Patricia Piccinini - Balasana - 2009 - Silicone, fiberglass, human hair, clothing, Red-necked Wallaby, rug

In Balasana – the Sanskrit name for the yogic child pose, a little girl lies on a Turkish carpet, with a taxidermied albino wallaby – they die quickly because they get sunburned, I am told. “This work is about my desire or fantasy for a relationship with nature that is so intimate. In the child’s pose, you can have someone lie on your back and do it the other way.” The relationship is intuitive, connecting the two in symbiosis.

Patricia Piccinini Bottom Feeder 2009 - silicone, fiberglass, fox fur

Bottom Feeder, pictured above, a most pathetic looking creature with a rear-end that mimics a face with Buddha-like benevolence, is a decoy against predators and a disarming tactic adapted against humans to make them pause for thought or at least evoke a smile…

Patricia Piccinini The Strength of one Arm (Siberian Ibex) 2009 silicone, fiberglass, human hair, clothing, Siberian Ibex

The Strength of One Arm is based on a dugong – (a fork-tailed manatee) that sailors, she tells me, used to mistake as mermaids. And here the creature is doing acrobatics on an Ibex. “If it was an adult – we might think of him as a show-off. We’ve always wanted animals to perform for us. It makes us feel a little self conscious.” Questioning the attributes of what it means to be human, here the artist probes the boundaries of what we find sensual.

Movie productions have asked to license her creatures, but she says she is wary as they underestimate the ability of the viewer to take on complex ideas. Patricia Piccinini feels an attachment to her creations, they are her cherished off-springs after all, “My work needs to have a home where it is really loved. I do want to know where they all go.”

Patricia Piccinini, ‘Not As We Know It,’ on view till October 30, 2010 Haunch of Venison, New York, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10020

All images above courtesy of Haunch of Venison and/or artist where noted.

Polly Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy finches and canaries, steel, leather © Polly Morgan

UK artist Polly Morgan’s artworks have rarely been exhibited across the pond, and for that matter, they may well be quarantined before we get a closer look. Morgan trained early in her career as a taxidermist, specializing in skinning and mounting animals before recontexutalizing her work in a gallery setting, presenting the stuffed, trussed specimens like bizarre Victorian curios: rats in champagne glasses, dead chicks spilling out of the crevices of old coffins, and exquisite corpses entombed in jewellery cases. But within these fanciful visions lie an implicit meditation on death.

Flight of Fancy (Nuthatch), 2009 Crystal jewellery box, 2009 Crystal jewellery boxtaxidermy Nuthatch, © Polly Morgan

In Psychopomps, her latest solo-show at Haunch of Venison in London, she presents the animals as mythical flying creatures that convey souls into the after-life. The suspended taxidermist sculptures are fabulous allusions to their mythological counterparts, death’s escorts like Hermes and Charon and Anubis the jackal-headed Egyptian God, or the Norse Valkyries, who choose those who die in battle and bring them into Valhalla.

Carrion Call, (Detail) 2009 by Polly Morgan. Wooden coffin, taxidermy quail chicks

Polly Morgan Still Birth (Purple), 2010, Taxidermy pheasant chick,

In one such Psychopomp, a preserved cardinal is suspended inside a bare white ribcage and in another, the birds carry off their cage rather than be imprisoned by it. A composite of crow feathers like a monstrous swarm suggests a metamorphosis, a transitional state for the soul in its flight from life.

Morgan is not unique in her fascination with stuffed dead things, Maurizio Cattelan and the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping are among those who have brought humor and poignancy to the morbid  world of corpses.  When Deyrolle burned down in Paris, many artists rushed to salvage the crisped mummified bears and tigers from the ashes – but Morgan alone has apprenticed in the art of preserving the moment of death before the onset of decay.

The artist grew up in the Cotswolds with rather an eccentric upbringing, surrounded by goats and llamas and an animal-loving father who insisted on dissecting them to ascertain the cause of their deaths. Morgan has said she would not create taxidermies of an animal she had known when alive, but has become habituated to using the animals as material for her art much like an artist might use paint. Instead of a fear of death, Morgan’s sculptures evoke a magical sense of transformation, a celebration and anticipation of the journey beyond.

Polly Morgan, Psychopomp, Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, till September 25^th 2010

All Photographs Courtesy of Haunch of Venison