PEELING BACK THE LAYERS WITH OUR FAVOURITE TAXIDERMY ARTIST
After learning taxidermy in 2004, British artist Polly Morgan has been dismantling its traditions, creating still lives that celebrate animals in death rather than life.
Her recent works combine taxidermy with her model-making and painting skills to lie somewhere between figuration and abstraction.
She says: “I am interested in how our real world and online homes shape us and how we make our own modifications to fit them, be they bricks and mortar or digitally driven social networks. Using casting and the trompe l’oeil designs in nail artistry, I make sculptural facsimiles as ways to probe the disparity between what is real and what isn’t.”
EXHIBITING AT THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF SCULPTORS
Morgan’s first public sculpture, and her largest to date, OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW! was displayed on the sculptural terrace at Dora House from February to April, before being sited at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Winner of the Society’s First Plinth: Public Art Award, OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW! consists of two triangles of furrowed concrete adorned with painted, iridescent fiberglass casts of snakes that spill from the crevices and connect the two.
The sculpture represents how we are all shaped and constrained by our environment. At times, intertwined, repelling and jostling for position.
Running concurrently, False Flags saw Morgan team up with US artist and decades-long friend Leena Similu for a joint exhibition.
Alongside Similu’s anthropomorphic ceramics, which are inspired by the masks of her mother’s homeland, Cameroon, Morgan’s snakeskin-textured sculptures illustrate beauty both as signal and armour. Through camouflage, mimicry and subterfuge, she explores the politicisation of bodily adornments, drawing parallels between military, cultural and primal warfare.
WHAT TO EXPECT IN 2024
Morgan is working on her first video piece to accompany a London exhibition later in the year.
She says: “I’ve been increasingly inspired by film and am excited to be discovering new mediums at this stage in my career.”
