Polly Morgan
A trained taxidermist, Morgan began working as an artist in 2005. Since then she has attracted a multitude of collectors from David Roberts and Anita Zabludowicz to Kate Moss and will cap exhibitions in 2009 at Tunnel 228 and the Lazarides gallery, with upcoming shows with All Visual Arts in October and at Haunch of Venison in London in May 2010. Her work exploits her taxidermy skills in still life arrangements. She plays with conventions of both: the interaction of the wild subjects within the peculiar context of the civilised still life pose; the conceit of the dead animal frozen in a living pose. Inevitable considerations of death and horror run through her subjects, often animals are left in an ambiguous sleep or not just preserved, but arranged, at the point between death and decaying - a period she delights in.
Dead Heads
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Photography
40cm x 50cm
Giclee print on watercolour paper
Edition of 150
Clusters of quail chicks are often used in Morgan's work to represent moss on the side of a derelict coffin, a swarm of maggots or a chorus of voices from a telephone receiver. Here she calls them Dead Heads; a term used to describe the decapitation of spent flowers, which can be read as a metaphor for the chicks' own short lives.
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