Picture someone spending a week in Rome, transfixed before marble busts and soaring granite columns: that familiar figure who conflates stone with eternity, setting it against the perishable craft of woodcarvers or glassmakers scattered to the wind and returned to dust, wielding permanence as a bulwark against their own mortality and inconsequence. Throughout human history, the urge to remain solid, monolithic, and fortified against the world’s fluid chaos has been mixed directly into the mortar of monuments. But what if that cold, unyielding rock we lean on harbors an uncanny memory—a latent impulse to dissolve, fracture, and liquefy from within?
At Xxijra Hii in London, Hannah Morgan’s solo exhibition SYPEN (closing 24 October) takes its stand precisely at this disorienting rupture. Much like the nightmare of the “monument-worshipper” conjured in writer Rosanna McLaughlin’s evocative exhibition text, Morgan draws us into a subterranean realm of moisture, unease, and flux—shattering the monument, rigidity, and the boundaries of the human body against stone only to liquefy them.
The Chemistry of Anhydrous Stone: Anhydrite and Mine Waters
At the core of Morgan’s artistic inquiry lies an uncanny mineral harvested from the periphery of open-cast mines: anhydrite. Etymologically rooted in the Greek for “waterless,” this rock appears stubbornly resistant to moisture, yet it conceals a volatile alchemy. Upon contact with water, it undergoes a chemical metamorphosis, surrendering its dense crystalline structure to gradually degenerate into soft, chalky gypsum.
Stepping into Xxijra Hii, one is met by a stainless-steel armature resting on oak beams—recalling a nomadic reliquary crate primed for swift disassembly, or a fragile museum vitrine. Set along and beneath this framework are chunks of blue anhydrite, colloquially dubbed “bowel stone” for their visceral contours. Streaked with dark veins reminiscent of aged blood clots, these sculptural masses twist like jointed, alien limbs poised to rupture from beneath the skin.
Suspended directly overhead hang blown-glass vessels suggestive of amorphous cells (ampullae ii & iii). From these reservoirs, water collected from underground mines drips steadily onto the stone below. Surfaces struck by the droplets shift in texture over minutes and days; a buffed sheen yields to a powdery, sloughing, friable vulnerability. Morgan liberates sculpture from the guise of a resolved, static artifact, staging instead an active arena of transformation where erosion unfolds in real time.
Relics and Liquefying Bodies
The exhibition oscillates between medieval apocalyptic lore and subterranean mythologies. Mounted in a shallow wall niche, Signacula ii is a revolving kinetic work carved into satin spar—a fibrous variety of gypsum gathered along the banks of a water source. Echoing the badges pinned to medieval pilgrims’ coats, the object rotates slowly, intermittently revealing and withholding engravings of strained sinew and muscle. Left exposed rather than encased or framed, the stone is delicate and precarious, feeling as though it might snap between one’s fingers at the slightest touch.
Morgan’s underground topography systematically perforates the rigid boundary between body and matter. Here, stone ceases to be mere sculptural material; it becomes an organic surface akin to flesh—sweating, weeping, and bruising upon contact. In defiance of our hardened armors, our marble sanctuaries, and our illusions of fixed identity, it murmurs that through the fluids weeping from our pores, the moisture of the soil, and the relentless currents of the world, we are leveled into the selfsame biological mire.
SYPEN does not summon the viewer to a sterile exercise in sculptural observation, but invites us to partake in the raw, sodden, and endlessly mutating currents of the subterranean. This pilgrimage—where stone dissolves, monuments crumble to dust, and water binds all things—stands as one of the season’s most audacious encounters in London for anyone seeking to feel the precarity of form and time down to their marrow.
