Half-Finished Heaven

15 March – 13 April 2025
Helen Morgan

Exhibition text by Emma McLean
Poster design by Ivy Chen
Install by Tom Favelle and Joel Walker
Organised by Luna Wenxin Xu
Sponsored by No.9 Space Design Studio

Half-Finished Heaven

An installation by Helen Morgan

And here, below with the ghosts, in the empire of bitter endings, be the clinking glass that, even as it shatters, rings.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, part 2, #13

Next to artist Helen Morgan’s warm and deteriorating family home sits a large old garage and, in this place, Morgan’s father would collect items in which he saw potential: car parts, light fittings, old tools, pieces of granite and timber, windows, ornaments, and electronic components. The garage became a place for things with a slim chance at new life, but of ambition and intent. In this space, the objects’ curves, granular rust and jaunty edges are softly illuminated by a filtered light in which dust mites swirl. The energy is still and charged with gentle possibility. Soon, the house and adjoining garage will be demolished.

Now, imagine you are in a dream. In this dream there’s an amalgamation of disjointed objects such as those belonging in a garage, or a typical still life composition. You’re aware of people picking these objects up and placing them in an arrangement, shifting them, rotating them slightly until all at once, the objects lock into place. There can be no possible alternative placement because their order and exact positioning is faultless. They resonate with each other and the negative spaces left between are unquestionably right. You are elated at this moment of perfection, and then you wake up. This is the dream from which Morgan awoke and now pursues, with the help of collaborators Tom Favelle and Joel Walker, at Puzzle.

Morgan is consistently enticed by the status of overlooked objects and materials, which she draws upon in her printmaking, photography and installation practice. She is often inspired by her century-old, Federation-style family home in Western Sydney, and the nuances of growing up Egyptian–Australian. Federation homes were designed with the Australian climate in mind, but also for aesthetic enjoyment. From the satisfying contrast of deep red brickwork with timber, decorative leadlighting, curved archways, swirling motifs and wrap-around verandas, these homes hark back to an architectural time considerate of the human experience. Morgan is making peace with its imminent demolition and, in creating this artwork, has salvaged items from the home and garage with a heightened potential in mind.

In speaking about this artwork, Morgan referenced Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project in which he states, ‘The collector dreams his way not only into a distant and bygone world, but also into a better one … in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.’ This statement strikes a chord. In uniting spent objects with their attachments of history and hope, their utility is negated and their presence is instead brought to the fore. They are no longer of this practical world, but inhabit a kind of separate, imaginative space. Morgan interrogates what these objects represent once they become purely sculptural, when in dialogue with one another, and when elevated and given importance.

Morgan has drawn the installation’s name from the title of a 1997 poem by Tomas Tranströmer, The Half-Finished Heaven. In this piece, Tranströmer conjures an atmosphere of intense mystery and an abstracted sense of optimism, closing the gap between the world we actually experience and a world of possibility. Morgan spots this glimmering potential in the detritus of the everyday – a secret that artists have been pointing to for some time. When observed, considered and arranged, objects can generate a specific energy and things that are not conventionally beautiful can be transformed.

Aesthetic order has always been sacred to artists and, dichotomously, visual logic can create a sense of otherworldliness. It may seem far-fetched, but there is little difference between the careful placement of figures in Renaissance paintings, and the exactitude of squares in the work of Piet Mondrian. The removal of just one small square, one cherub or motif, would tip the balance into disarray. Visual scales are always maintained by values of weight, form, volume, size, colour – it is a mysterious and intuitive understanding. It is also tied up with our mortality: the careful placement of family photos on a mantlepiece, the dedication of a candle at a place of worship, the arrangement of items forming an altar – we have the power to imbue meaning, and to create divine things.

Half-Finished Heaven features moments of visual poetry. Each gathering of items is a composition revealing the artist’s devotion to the humbleness of objects, and to her memories. With intention, she gives these arrangements their last flickers of a life beyond utility so that their endings are not so bitter. Freed from the drudgery of usefulness.

Emma McLean lives on Gadigal Land. She is deputy editor of Look magazine.