SPREAD | ArtCulture

By Kiša Lala

I walked into Polly Morgan’s studio in East London with the wild hope that it might be a dungeon of dripping carcasses or a Madame Tussaud’s of stuffed cadavers. That turned out to be fanciful thinking as instead I found myself in a warm and cheerful place with assistants hard at work and a kettle on the boil, and if there was a funny smell it was, Polly assured me, just her lamb stew at lunch, not the waft of an odorous beast she’d flayed.

There was a fox in the fridge snuggled in its bushy tail, looking more cosy than dead: It was a good place to guard against moths in the afterlife. I sat near an old ruptured coffin with a plague of quail chicks oozing from its cracks while an assistant picked over a bird skinned, drawn and quartered on an old newspaper, but nothing out of the ordinary. Morgan’s dogs, Trotsky and Tony sniffed and scratched around as we chatted, too civilized to snack on anything other than tinned food.

Morgan is attractive, lively and charming which might seem socially at odds with her morbid fascination for dead things. But Morgans’ art is interesting all the more because we obsess over the body while it lives but care little after it stops being host. Our lack of interest in the life of things obsolete was the topic of my conversation with Edward Burtynsky. One might assume that anything now non-living, could once have stopped living. A corpse is special for being the shed husk of something that had recently lived. By preserving the moment before the onset of decay, Morgan makes corpses eloquent. She is not sentimental about the creature’s life, though she admits she would never stuff a pet. Yet the thread of mortality still exists – her art being more than just stuffed, pretty dead things.

“To start with it was a bit like that – and I was just fascinated about the taxidermy process and hanging onto dead animals.” But knowing a creature intimately was a learning process – she could study the shape of their skulls, varieties of beaks and eyes, and they couldn’t run away or rot.

“You are making them look alive, or making them look dead.” Pointing to the coffin near me, (Carrion Call) that she had built out of old floorboards, she say, “The idea behind it is inspired by a picture I took of a dead blackbird used as a nesting site for flies; it was riddled with maggots. I intentionally put the blackbird out to get infested with maggots because I was working on an exhibition loosely themed ‘Tomorrow’ for the ICA’s 60th anniversary. I was disgusted as we are prone to be, but something dead becomes a nest for new life. Coffins are fairly egg-shaped. It’s a symbol of life triumphing, emerging from death.”

She elicits emotion through contrived death poses using limp bodies, recently vacated. Morgan’s taxidermy is nothing like the cute, anthropomorphized dioramas of Walter Potter’s stuffed-hamster tea parties, but even though there is that macabre Edgar Allen Poe-Gothic theatricality surrounding some of her work, it has more of a contemporary Pop sensibility.

You choose birds because there’s something vulnerable about them that’s right for your art?
There’s something vulnerable about a bird lying down. You see mammals lying down, sleeping. But birds tuck in while perched when they sleep; if they’re lying down they are dead. When you see a bird unable to fly it’s powerless and motionless. It’s like a tiger without teeth.

How did you learn to debone flesh? Did you study anatomy?
“It’s not that different from butchery really. People assume the taxidermy process is about going inside the body and pulling out entrails etc., but it’s really about skinning the body. The first is butchery; the second part is sculpture. You pick up this innate understanding of the structure of a body. It would have helped to study anatomy but I haven’t. I’m tactile. Some people can have something pointed out, [and grasp it] I have to physically touch it.”

“When carving meat I know what to aim for, I’m not just hacking, I know how to go for the muscle and go through it.”

Have you ever had to kill the creatures yourself?
“No, and I haven’t had any killed for me either. It’s lazy and illegal too in a lot of cases. You can’t just go and kill garden birds in Britain. I put the word out amongst family and friends and they put the word out, and slowly over the years I have built up a network of people. I’ve been proactive to put ads in aviary magazines and fairs where people sell live birds, explaining that I will buy them if and when they die. So they put it in the freezer and send them to me. And taxidermists often swap things too.”

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Read Part 2 of this interview
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