November 26, 2011 |
Polly Morgan is the British artist who works with dead birds and animals. She makes very beautiful sculptures that include an element of taxidermy: a tiny rat curled in a pretty glass, a dead robin folded over an antique prayer book, a dark ball of black wings gathered to make some gothic creature, a manifestation of dream or imagination.
Her work can be playfully dark. There is a nice piece in which a handful of dead chicks, open-mouthed, are squeezed into the mouthpiece of an old black telephone. She is collected by the beautiful and the great – Kate Moss has bought one of her pieces. She can command a six-figure sum for a large work but also produces affordable editions. Most recently, scaled-down versions of Still Birth – a tiny dead bird attached to a resin balloon, the whole thing put in one of those glass Victorian jars.
“My work seems to appeal to lots of people who wouldn’t necessarily buy art or have thousands and thousands of pounds. The editions are something on a much cheaper scale. I’ve sold stuff to students, even. I like the fact that lots of people can buy it and not just very wealthy people.”
Morgan comes from the countryside. From somewhere out near the Cotswolds. She is young but she doesn’t carry the marks of street or pop culture. She is pale and English, fond of her dogs, very clear and cut-glass hard. On the day of this particular interview, she is settling herself into a building in Hackney Wick, at least three stories of former factory or workspace. She has a worktable on the ground floor, a long metal surface (like a surgical table) where she is assembling things: a tiny dead chick curled on a small wooden brush.
Below the table is an old chest of drawers – the drawers have labels: “pins”, “needles”, “blades”, “wire” and “chick legs”.
“I love what I’m doing,” says Morgan. She compares taxidermy to cooking. “I get a lot of pleasure out of working. When I’m not working I really don’t know what to do with myself and I start to feel really edgy because I want to be doing something. That doesn’t leave much time for leisure. But I suppose my work is leisure in a way. It started as a hobby and it became a job.”
She isn’t an art-school grad. Her story runs (more or less) as follows: she studied English at university and ended up running a bar in east London. She becomes friendly with many successful British artists. She decides she would like some taxidermy to stick in her flat and, disappointed with what she finds on eBay, goes to Edinburgh to do a short course in taxidermy. She becomes an amateur taxidermist (or home taxidermist) and makes works – such as the dead bird in jar with a prayer book – that are shown in a Shoreditch restaurant. These attract attention, including that of Banksy, who invites her to make work for his pop-up shop/exhibition Santa’s Ghetto. From this point onwards she begins to have a life in art.
The interest in dead things goes back to when she was a little girl – aged five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten – and used to find or collect dead creatures – birds and so on. “When I was young I always wanted to hang onto the dead bodies I found and obviously I learned that I couldn’t – they would rot and become disgusting. There’s a very short period between something dying and then decaying.”
She and her mother would bury the dead birds in her garden. The insects, she could keep. “I had butterflies and bugs on my windowsill when I was a kid. She let me have them but not the birds. I used to stage little funerals and stuff for the birds in the garden.”
It is usual in taxidermy to present dead animals as looking vaguely alive. The dead birds and animals in Morgan’s work are often presented as dead. It is part of the creepiness of her art that the birds in her sculptures are twice dead.
“I’ve always loved taxidermy,” she says, “but I wasn’t totally convinced by it. You’ve got a bird that looks alive but it’s not moving, so it’s clearly not alive. It doesn’t trick you completely, whereas I like the idea of taxidermy as having something that looks dead that could really be dead and you can’t tell from looking at it whether its been taxidermied or whether its going to rot.”
Morgan says she spends most of her time either making work – filleting birds and so on – doing admin (emails, etc) and, sometimes, seeing the other side of the art scene, where the money and weirdness flows.
“I never know,” she says, “what I can actually say or tell you.” Courtney Love, she says, who bought one of her pieces, “text stalked” her for a while, sending her long messages in the night about life and Kurt’s death. “She became a bit of a problem in my life for a while. Which I never would have anticipated.
“But I have seen things. Like you turn up in a club and they’ve Goldfrapp playing and all these naked girls dancing on the tables and cheese and fruit falling off the tables and blacked out cars outside and guys with weapons. And you feel like you’ve stepped into a James Bond set. Things I certainly never anticipated when I went up to Scotland and had a lesson with a taxidermist in the middle of nowhere.”
Her first works were quite small – most were fitted (charmingly) into Victorian glass or bell jars so they looked like romantic, macabre museum pieces. Morgan also inserted tiny chandeliers (handmade from Austrian crystal for expensive dolls houses) that could be plugged in and switched on. But she has made larger pieces. Her recent show Psychopomps (the word refers to winged escorts that take us to the afterlife) featured a large human form made of ribbons – each ribbon attached to a bird in flight that seemed to be unravelling (or wrapping) the human form. The piece is called Carnevale.
“I liked the title because it sounded like a party. Ribbons suited it on that level. Etymologically, it means Festival of the Flesh. And Farewell to the Flesh. It’s a literal translation from the Latin. And that suited it well because it is a mummy or figure being mummified in these ribbons. It’s a combination of a maypole, an afterlife ritual and also this burial of the mummy with the dead birds.”
I wonder if anyone ever worried about her. She has a mordant wit. In one sculpture she uses a mouse skin as a tiny rug – a play on the bear- or tiger-skin rug. She is droll about the dead.
“When I was a kid I used to write stories all the time about murders and death and the afterlife. My mum was taking me to one side and saying she was worried because I was a bit morbid. And, ‘Was everything okay?’ But I was always really cheerful but I had this gothic streak in me, I guess. It’s just a way of channelling your fears about death and all those sorts of things.”
In the future Morgan will work on larger animals. She is confident, she says, about her taxidermy skills. She has a stag lined up. And fancies a camel. She has put out feelers to zoos.
It takes time, she says, to get good at taxidermy. “But it is pretty straightforward. You make a cut down the front and peel the skin off the body. You try not to tear it. You take all the flesh and fat out. And you kind of… build a fake body and wire the bones… that’s like sculpture. And anyone could do a really crap job, but making it fit back inside the skin, and so on… Well, it takes practice.”
These days she can do a chick in a couple of hours. “A seagull I can do in a day. A vulture in a week.”
Do check out her website. For the moment she is still making editions – they are dark and lovely and, as she says, quite affordable (you can get a quail chick’s head in a test tube for as little as £300). They all carry the marks of darkness, the mortal and dreamed-of immortal – irresistible. Really.
Text Tony Marcus
Photographer Niall O’Brien
Fashion Editor Sophia Neophitou
