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Polly Morgan
Polly Morgan exhibited in Ascension, 2008.
Morgan’s work is a continuing dialogue between beauty and mortality. She deals both with the exquisiteness of life and its inescapable transience. Morgan, 29, is a member of the Guild of Taxidermists and uses stuffed animal carcasses to create arresting works of art. Her intention is never to mimic an animals’ natural habitat but instead to place them in unusual settings, deliberately decontextualising her subjects.
A pigeon is therefore shown resting, as though in slumber, inside a bottle (Messenger). The fragile contours of a small long tailed tit bird are placed against the rigid lines of a prayer book (To Every Seed His Own Body).
‘I like the thought of making people look at things twice,’ says Morgan. ‘If you see a rat rummaging through rubbish, you wouldn’t think it was beautiful but putting it in a different setting somehow elevates it.’
The result is sometimes disquieting but, more often than not, her art is also strangely calming and poignant: a perpetual distillation of life at the moment of death. There is also, says Morgan, a distinctly tactile element to her work. As a child growing up in the Cotswolds, she remembers coming across animal corpses on country walks and instinctively wanting to touch them. ‘I like preserving that moment and stretching it out indefinitely,’ she says.
Morgan, who never went to art college, has been working as an artist since 2005 when she studied the art of taxidermy under the tutelage of George Jamieson in Scotland. It is an intricately technical process: Morgan skins the carcass and then makes an armature based on the animal’s body shape that is stuffed with wood wool and bound with string. All of her carcasses are either roadkill or donations after unpreventable or natural deaths. ‘It is part butchery, part sculpture,’ she says. ‘I’ve only got queasy once. That was with a fox that was quite a bad road kill and there was blood and guts everywhere.’
Morgan, who lives and works in London, has exhibited in America and the UK, including the White Cube, Hoxton. In 2007 she mounted her first solo exhibtion, The Exquisite Corpse at Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone and in 2008 she exhibited in Ascension, with Simon Oldfield Gallery.
Her work has sold to collectors such as David Roberts and Anita Zabludowicz. Other customers include the model Kate Moss and the singer Sharleen Spiteri.
Elizabeth Day, feature writer for The Observer