Punta Della Dogana, Venice - photo kisa lala

Aside from the biennale there was a surfeit of art on the island; here are some from the overflow.

Christian Boltanski at the French Pavilion in 54th Venice Biennale 2011 – “Chance.” Babies on Track: A mechanical view of the birth of chance.

Anton Ginzburg goes in search of Hyperborea, a mythic land, the home of the North Wind. The wind served as a haunting sound-track for the video shot in Russia and Siberia, and Oregon.

Anton Ginzburg - At the back of the North Wind: Hyperborea Series

Plenty of wolves sighted in Oregon – enough to be present in the artist’s video.

Anton Ginzburg - At the back of the North Wind: Hyperborea Series

Strangely static: Stuffed pigeons were perched everywhere:

Maurizio Cattelan Turisti 1997 Taxidermized pigions Environmental dimension Courtesy of Maurizio Cattelan Archive

Artist Polly Morgan showed new work in Venice.

Polly Morgan, Burials, Workshop Arte Contemporanea, Venice 2011

South African artist Nicholas Hlobo's work at Arsenale

The Fondazione Prada at Ca' Corner della Regina had works by Kapoor, Hirst, Francesco Vezzoli and others.

Neon sign: Bye Bye Ai Wei Wei on the waterfront

Lovebird, 2005, Taxidermy lovebird, Taxidermy mouse skin, Brass, Metal, Glass, Wood, 30 x 20 cm @ Polly Morgan

Interview continued with Polly Morgan Part 2 (Read Part 1)
Morgan grew up in the country, “It wasn’t a farm. [My dad] was an eccentric character. He used to start businesses up, generally importing and exporting of animals, but then he would get sentimentally attached to them, and never let them go. They were never killed. We had Angora goats, llamas, ostriches, chickens for a while.”

Still, Morgan prefers small creatures than large mammals for her art. The largest has been the white-back vultures, which took a good year from concept to finish. She works with a 3D computer modeler to visualize relative sizes. “I try not to be set on the birds…because I could go for years without finding enough…so the flying machine was a variety of birds… I made a smaller one with bright orange finches and canaries to look like flames but it’s impossible to find enough, so I had to experiment in dying feathers with hair dye.”

When she finally visited Deyrolle in Paris, she was, “Underwhelmed really – so many people mentioned it, I had built it up to be an incredible mecca I had to go to. I spent hours looking for it, so I was knackered when I got there, and half their stock was gone – since the fire. The taxidermy was very badly done – and I’m not just being a taxidermy snob!” she laughs.

In Polly Morgan's fridge: Fox and Magpie. Photo: Kisa Lala

Polly Morgan's Blackboard photo:Kisa Lala

Still Birth - Purple 2010 - Taxidermy Pheasant chick, resin balloon - © Polly Morgan

“Systemic Inflammation” references concepts for imaginary flying machines. Morgan was interested in the way animals had been historically harnessed: Carrier-pigeons, monkeys in space. Air balloons. In Still Birth, a chick is tethered as though through an umbilical cord to a balloon cast in resin that won’t deflate. She’s fascinated with birds and flying and used Muybridge as a reference in Black Fever. In fact, Morgan says it ruined her holiday in Jamaica when she forgot her bird book.

Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy Finches © Polly Morgan

Departures, 2009 © Polly Morgan - Installation View at Thomas Olbricht's Me Collectors Room on Augustrasse in Berlin

No, because in mummification you’re preserving what’s already there, whereas in taxidermy you are taking out a vast majority of the animal. It’s like peeling a latex suit off a human. You are keeping the skin, feathers or fur, and a few bones. Bones don’t decay. With birds, I keep the skull and strip them off flesh. When you’re bending the wires in place it helps as guide. I use woodwool, used to pack crockery, bind it with string and penetrate it with wires then stick it into the body’s central core. That anchors them there. Then you stitch up the skin in the front. You fill up all the cavities and skull with clay. You take out the brain and eyeballs. Often you remove the skull in mammals because after you take off the gristle and flesh around the skull – it will disconnect off the jaw and the padding is gone, so it’s best to sculpt the shape.”

The skin is still organic – can it decay?

Not once you’ve tanned it. It’s preserved like leather. With birds, sometimes you put chemicals on the skin but often when you take the flesh off, it’s just brittle, like parchment and dries. Then you position it and don’t touch it for a few weeks until it dries out. If you try to move the head after it dries it will just tear like paper.

Could you do that to a human being? Has it ever been done?

It has – not sure what methods were used. The former incarnation of Haunch of Venison (at Burlington Gardens, London), used to be the Museum of Mankind. They had a taxidermied black woman that an explorer had brought back. They used to do that – preserve people and bring them back; they couldn’t take photos, but they could go, ‘look what I found back there.’ I would have liked to have had seen it because I could have worked out how they’d done it. Must be pretty ghastly…

Mummification preserves the facial expressions – it’s much more real in that sense, right?

Exactly, if you’d taxidermied a human being – all you’d have was skin and it would be up to you to model, the face. You could end up with anything! Taxidermists are reluctant to do people’s pets because they’ll make it look like a dog, but the person will come back and go, ‘that’s not my dog’ – something different about the expression. They have a rule: put the animal in the freezer for 3 months, and if you still want to have it done after that, then they’ll do it…it’s because owners often don’t come and collect once it’s done because they can’t bare seeing it again…

© Polly Morgan, Dead Ringer

Polly Morgan’s work can be seen at following shows in London and Venice:

‘Women make Sculpture’, at Pangolin London from 19th May – 18th June.

Polly Morgan, Burials, Venice, June 3rd through July 22nd, 2011

Atrial Flutter: Taxidermy Cardinal in Ribcage - Portrait of Polly Morgan by Stuart Hall for Spread ArtCulture © Stuart Hall 2010

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.

Reciever © Polly Morgan

Assistants at work at Polly Morgan's studio, London. Photo: Kisa Lala

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.

Carrion Call, Taxidermy Quail Chicks, 2009, © Polly Morgan

“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.”

Rest a Little on the Lap of Life, 2005, Taxidermy Rat, Champagne Glass, Crystal Chandelier, Glass, Wood, @ Polly Morgan

Vestige, © Polly Morgan

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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Polly Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy finches and canaries, steel, leather © Polly Morgan

UK artist Polly Morgan’s artworks have rarely been exhibited across the pond, and for that matter, they may well be quarantined before we get a closer look. Morgan trained early in her career as a taxidermist, specializing in skinning and mounting animals before recontexutalizing her work in a gallery setting, presenting the stuffed, trussed specimens like bizarre Victorian curios: rats in champagne glasses, dead chicks spilling out of the crevices of old coffins, and exquisite corpses entombed in jewellery cases. But within these fanciful visions lie an implicit meditation on death.

Flight of Fancy (Nuthatch), 2009 Crystal jewellery box, 2009 Crystal jewellery boxtaxidermy Nuthatch, © Polly Morgan

In Psychopomps, her latest solo-show at Haunch of Venison in London, she presents the animals as mythical flying creatures that convey souls into the after-life. The suspended taxidermist sculptures are fabulous allusions to their mythological counterparts, death’s escorts like Hermes and Charon and Anubis the jackal-headed Egyptian God, or the Norse Valkyries, who choose those who die in battle and bring them into Valhalla.

Carrion Call, (Detail) 2009 by Polly Morgan. Wooden coffin, taxidermy quail chicks

Polly Morgan Still Birth (Purple), 2010, Taxidermy pheasant chick,

In one such Psychopomp, a preserved cardinal is suspended inside a bare white ribcage and in another, the birds carry off their cage rather than be imprisoned by it. A composite of crow feathers like a monstrous swarm suggests a metamorphosis, a transitional state for the soul in its flight from life.

Morgan is not unique in her fascination with stuffed dead things, Maurizio Cattelan and the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping are among those who have brought humor and poignancy to the morbid  world of corpses.  When Deyrolle burned down in Paris, many artists rushed to salvage the crisped mummified bears and tigers from the ashes – but Morgan alone has apprenticed in the art of preserving the moment of death before the onset of decay.

The artist grew up in the Cotswolds with rather an eccentric upbringing, surrounded by goats and llamas and an animal-loving father who insisted on dissecting them to ascertain the cause of their deaths. Morgan has said she would not create taxidermies of an animal she had known when alive, but has become habituated to using the animals as material for her art much like an artist might use paint. Instead of a fear of death, Morgan’s sculptures evoke a magical sense of transformation, a celebration and anticipation of the journey beyond.

Polly Morgan, Psychopomp, Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, till September 25^th 2010

All Photographs Courtesy of Haunch of Venison