See Polly Morgan’s newest works while you still can

British artist Polly Morgan’s first public sculpture, OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW!, and accompanying exhibition False Flags, is available to view at the Royal Society of Sculptors until April 29.

Winner of the Society’s First Plinth: Public Art Award, it is Morgan’s largest sculpture to date and will be on show on the sculpture terrace at the newly restored Dora House before it moves to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Taking its title from the name given to any conduit with a free surface, OPEN! CHANNEL! FLOW! consists of two triangles of furrowed concrete adorned with painted, iridescent fibreglass casts of snakes that spill from the crevices and reflect light as rainbows. It represents how we are all shaped and constrained by our environment: the refracted light is the energy, ebb and flow of ideas, and the serpentine forms embody all life; at points intertwining, repelling and jostling for position.

Snakes, beauty, veneers and more

A self-taught artist with no formal education in art, Morgan rose to attention after learning taxidermy in 2004 when she began to dismantle taxidermy traditions, creating unsettling still lives where the animal was observed in death rather than life. Her recent works combine taxidermy with her model-making and painting skills and lie somewhere between figuration and abstraction.

False Flags, which is a joint exhibition with Leena Similu, continues Morgan’s exploration of snakes and was actually inspired by some acrylic nails she bought to test paint on. They arrived on a plastic ‘sprue’ like a modelling kit, which reminded her of the vertebrae of a snake. With the pointed nails on either side looking little spears or shields, she began to think about how women refer to beauty as being their ‘armour’. She made a large acrylic ‘nail’ and skinned a snake with pointed scales that echoed the nail’s shape and stretched it over the form, before casting out multiples and painting them to resemble snakes. She says: “They became the perfect confluence of everything I was interested in; snakes, beauty, veneers, packaging and minimalism and I’m delighted with them.”