Polly Morgan What Do Artists Do All Day?

I do think taxidermy appeals to people, perhaps,

who don't have any time for conceptual art

and they like to see the work that's gone into it

and maybe just to be reassured that they couldn't do that themselves.

I like to think my work kind of combines both of those.

It can be conceptual and have that craft too.

It's a parrot. I'm just looking for something specific right now.

This is a gannet.

A lady in Liverpool sent me it, she found it on the beach.

To start with, when I first began doing taxidermy,

I was so overawed by the animals themselves

that I would get inspiration from just looking at a bird or something

and it was a much more instinctive thing, so I would walk around

with a bird and I'd put it on things and in things and I would

just sort of see the way it moved and the colours and I would sort of...

..just kind of... I'd handle it for a day or something, I suppose,

and start to get a feel for how I think it might look good or

what elements I could juxtapose it with to make it,

to sort of bring out the beauty in it.

This piece I'm going to make will be a scrunched-up bit of paper,

so, like, the discarding of an idea.

I'm going to cast the paper in plaster or jesmonite

so it'll look like a ball of paper

and it's going to have a broken pencil, again,

something that you do when you're maddened by your inability to work.

A broken pencil, but in the shape of a lightning bolt

so it's going to come out of this scrunched-up paper, which will

represent the cloud, the cloud hanging over everything,

which is sort of how I've been feeling lately.

Every time I think of something, the next day I'll wake up

and decide it's not good enough, so I've had this cloud hanging over me

and that's going to be represented with a scrunched-up ball of paper.

And then the lightning flash will be made of a broken pencil

and it's going to be penetrating the breast of the bird.

I'm actually thinking now, putting this bird next to these,

I'm wondering if the bird may be a little bit too big for this piece.

I might try and find something a bit smaller. Oh...

Ah...

I wonder whether this might be a slightly better bird.

This is a mynah bird.

I'm going to go look at this now.

It might be a little smaller.

Yeah, great, I'm going to use this one.

Tell me why that pleases you more.

It's just a slightly better size than the other one.

This one, to me, just looks a little bit too big.

It's only a fractional difference, but it makes...

It changes things, for me.

It's all about balance really, when I'm making stuff. Everything...

It's a difficult thing to explain,

but everything just need to balance right and I feel like that does.

One of my first works, right in the beginning,

I was just walking around my flat, in my studio, with this dead rat.

It was a very fleshy, very floppy thing.

I really like these old-fashioned champagne glasses

and I bought them from an antique shop.

And I put it inside and it fitted so nicely.

It sort of spilled out slightly on the edges,

it looked like a scoop of furry ice cream.

And there was something very surrealist about it

and it just looked really beautiful and I really...

It was that thing I talk about with balance, it just sort of balanced.

And it was bought by Vanessa Branson.

I installed it at her house next to a Grayson Perry vase

and I sort of thought, this is crazy.

I couldn't quite believe that someone who bought things like that

was buying my work.

So I'm basically disconnecting the top layer of skin,

with all the feathers rooted in, from the body.

Um...

which I do by making small cuts

and sort of peeling it with my fingers.

SHE BLOWS ON THE FEATHERS

I think taxidermy has, for a long time,

been about the display of the animal, and that's it really.

And everything else has been secondary to that. So...

the taxidermist would create little, kind of, worlds

and cases where they'd mimic the natural environment of the animal.

Um, and I've never sought to do that in my work at all.

Um, the animals,

I suppose, have been used more to convey an idea or an atmosphere or...

..to create humour for a number of reasons, but not my...

my sort of modus operandi has never been just to show

the animal as it is in life.

Just making sure that the balloon actually sits straight

cos sometimes it needs a bit of tweaking.

I...I've always wanted to bring taxidermy up-to-date I suppose.

And almost get away... Even though I use the domes and everything,

I've kind of wanted to get away from the Victoriana

that it's associated with.

And make it sort of more modern, and more sort of pop, I suppose.

And I found that, obviously, the balloon is a very sort of pop image.

And I thought there was something very poignant and touching, really,

about the sight of this little bird that had never matured

going up in a balloon.

There was something sort of womb-like about the balloon

and the string and the umbilical cord,

and I couldn't really get away from what it reminded me of.

Um, well, very often when people look at my work...

..certainly if they're just sort of not thinking deeply about it,

they think it's about death because I've used a dead animal.

But I would say to that that, you know,

charcoal drawing isn't about dead

because it's made out of dead wood, dead, burnt wood,

you know, I think that it's...

it is a material like any other

and I think it can be used to convey all kinds of meanings, really.

And it's very literal to look at it

and just assume that the artist is talking about death.

Sometimes I am, I'm not saying that I don't in my work, it does happen.

But that's not...that's not the only thing, and mostly actually,

I think my work's more about life

and about the triumph of life over death.

And, um, I did a piece of work a few years ago which was a coffin

that was sort of splitting open, it looked really rotten and decrepit.

And it had hundreds of tiny, tiny little quail chicks

bursting from within with their beaks open like they wanted to feed.

It kind of overwhelmed me, the sight of them altogether.

I'd been making all these heads and bodies for ages,

just sitting round doing the same thing every day for months.

And suddenly, just seeing them all like that,

all on top of each other and around each other,

they suddenly had the impact that I'd hoped they'd have.

I think, just chicks, trying to feed,

I find, personally, quite a shocking and alarming image.

Any suckling babies, really, they are like parasites really

and that's all they do.

Chicks are just mouths, really,

there's very little more to them than the mouth.

The mouth is really oversized in relation to the body.

And that's all they're about at that point.

And there's something very frenzied

and terrifying about that sort of need to be fed.

The terror really lies in life, not in death,

because death is a peaceful state, ultimately.

But it's the actual life and the fight for life

and the fight to stay alive which is actually more scary to me.

The show that I made this for was called Endless Plains

which is the English translation of Serengeti,

which was a place I visited a year or so ago now.

Inside...the...

what looks like the rib cage of the stag

are hundreds of little bats hanging on the ribs, asleep.

Um, and I've concealed mirrors

inside the stag at either end so that it looks like it goes on endlessly.

I came up with the idea of bats sleeping on the inside of there

because there's something very peaceful, but at the same time,

there's this sort of potential about bats sleeping,

you know that at any minute

they could all just sort of...come at you.

BATS WINGS FLAPPING WILDLY

I like the sort of idea of the uncanny and that sort of

doing a double-take on something when your mind plays tricks with you

and you, sort of, I don't know,

you think something is something else or...

that weird thing that happens in dreams when you're talking to someone

and then suddenly they're someone else and you don't even question it.

And I suppose, just to create something that feels familiar

to you somehow.

Even though it doesn't exist... is quite pleasing.

-Hiya.

-Hi.

You all right?

Yeah. How are you?

-Have you got my squirrel?

-Yes...

I have.

Not defrosting, hopefully.

There you go.

-Thank you.

-She's quite a big one.

-Clawing her way out the bag.

-Yeah, I know.

-Wow.

-She's quite big.

-Yeah, stupidly big, she's in good condition.

-Very good condition.

-A kind of stunned pose.

Maybe she just had a heart attack on the pavement.

I don't know where she found it.

-Think it was just outside the girl's house, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

Is that your role, then? Picking up dead animals?

-Yes.

-One of his roles, yeah.

-One of my many roles, yeah.

Delivery, special delivery. More special than the Royal Mail.

I had to check, when I was doing interviews for the job,

I had to check that the people were comfortable handling dead animals.

That's true. I'm not sure my flatmates appreciated it

in the freezer last night.

My vegan flatmates.

I decided early on that I wanted to work only with animals

that had died natural or unpreventable deaths.

Someone sent me a sort of exotic chicken once,

which was very odd looking,

I couldn't work out what it was for quite a while

because it had frozen in a strange position.

She's a friend of mine, and she's funny she just...she keeps animals

and she lives in the country and...

she's terrible at warning me, so she'll just send me, like,

her child's pet rabbit will suddenly arrive in the post one day.

Fortunately, I always seem to be in when they arrive.

But occasionally...

there's a guy who sends me bags of budgies.

He breeds budgies and he seems to lose a lot of budgies.

But he'll save them over time.

And suddenly just post me a massive box of budgies out of the blue

and I have missed his post a few times

and had to go pick up a load of rotten birds from the post office.

I try to say yes to everything I'm offered, really,

because I never know what I'm going to come up with next

and what I'm going to need.

And in the past, I've turned things down

and then a couple of weeks later suddenly thought of something

that involved that animal and kicked myself.

So as long as there's freezer space for it, I take it.

This was a totally unexpected present from a friend

a couple of months ago for my birthday.

She turned up for dinner in a posh restaurant

with it wrapped in bubble wrap and presented it to me.

It's a Cape buffalo. It's incredibly heavy.

And she's very small, but she's one of the toughest women I've ever met.

So she managed to carry it in.

Do you think people see a big bit of taxidermy

and they think, "Oh, Polly would like that"?

I guess so, yeah. Yeah.

They either with associate me with taxidermy or roadkill.

I often get texts from people saying,

"Saw a dead fox today and thought of you!"

I actually view my work and cooking,

meat for cooking, very separately, actually.

Because I did used to think that I might, erm,

eat the bodies that I removed from birds.

Cos it seems like a bit of a waste just throwing them out.

I would be slightly worried, existing on roadkill.

Maybe when I'm a crazy old lady.

Is that your ambition?

Well, I think I will be probably

quite a hermit as an old lady, I think.

I imagine myself living in the countryside with loads of dogs.

I mean, I have a lot of friends in the London art scene

and I like them and obviously if I'm out...

I think the problem is the times people see me pictured

represent probably about two percent of my time,

which is when I'm invited out to a party or something.

So I've made an effort, I've dressed up and I get there

and someone stops to take my picture

and I turn and smile for the camera like I'm enjoying myself.

And often, you know, I have a nice enough time.

But it doesn't mean I really want to be there.

And such a small amount of my time, but that's when I get photographed.

So that's what people see of me

and sometimes, what worries me a little bit, actually,

that that's probably...

and know I look in the papers and I see,

if I see photos of people at parties all the time I think,

"Oh, God! Do you ever get any work done?"

David, food's ready.

Everywhere I've lived before, I've been sort of...

The work has taken precedence

and the life has been, like, shoved in a corner.

Now I've got this really nice clear delineation between work and life,

with the two separate floors,

and I like to make them look really different as well.

One is kind of nice and clean and spacious

and the other's quite cluttered and dusty!

Does it not bother the dogs?

No, they're very used to it.

I got him as a puppy, and he's just...that's his life.

They love it when dead animals arrive in the post.

They run up to the box and start sniffing it,

and I know that something's arrived.

Um...no, they're not...

they're not very interested, really, in what I do.

I've tried feeding them the bodies before,

but they weren't that bothered.

They just sort of played football with them.

SHE LAUGHS And made a mess!

That's one thing that I find a bit unwelcome, actually, about taxidermy.

Sometimes you get...

you just can't help find yourself imagining

what's under the skin when your petting an animal.

So I'll just sometimes be stroking, cuddling the dogs,

and I can visualise what's underneath the skin,

because I've done foxes before and they're very similar.

And you really...even with humans, you know, I can sort of...

obviously I've never skinned a human being, but at the same time,

I can visualise now how things are put together, and it's great.

You know, on the one hand, it's given me a really...

..good understanding of nature and biology, but on the other hand...

..it does sort of intrude on your daily life sometimes

and it makes you feel...

It just makes you feel a bit more sort of prone and vulnerable, really.

You start to realise how fragile you really are.

You know, I'd know exactly how to chop my hand off if I needed to,

and where to aim for, and it just sort of makes me feel sometimes...

well, it reminds me of how fragile we all are, really.

SHE SIGHS

So I make an incision at the back of the skull like that.

And then across, sort of cut a box in it.

And then down here.

And then I cut this part here,

underneath the jaw.

I was very lucky. I got attention pretty quickly,

or my work got attention pretty quickly,

and I think it really is because the material I chose to use

was quite kind of captivating to people.

That's the tongue.

And on top of that, there weren't that many people,

or not many people doing it,

so it's far easier to stand out

than it would be if I was painting,

or if I was a photographer or something, you know?

Photographers and painters are ten a penny, really, in East London.

You have to be doing something pretty different with it

to get people's attention.

So I am aware of that.

I realise that it's not my genius

that has brought me the attention that I've got.

But now that I've got it, I think that I have to try and use it wisely.

The idea behind Departures was really to sort of create an homage

to an inventor that had created

a drawing of a flying machine.

It was a kind of carriage that a human would sit in,

and it would be carried by birds,

and in his instance, eagles.

There's just something touching, I think,

about that human need to fly.

We're earthbound creatures,

but yet, we want to go deep-sea diving,

we want to go up in the air, and we want to experience everything,

and we sort of have bird envy, I think, a lot of the time.

Departures was probably a reflection

of the confidence that I was feeling at the time in my work.

And also my desire to kind of make things a little bit less

ornamental and more monumental.

I wanted to see if I could be the sort of artist

that commands a space.

I named this piece Foundations/Remains

because I like the idea that it could be looked at in different ways.

It could either be the foundations of a building, of something new,

of something beautiful that's springing up,

because it almost looks like scaffolding,

or, like, the sort of foundations you put on a building

before it's all sort of assembled.

Or it could be the remains of something that has...

a building that has sprung up and has been allowed to die

and rotted, almost.

They are all crow femurs, so leg bones of the crow, and I made

about 20 or 30 moulds of them, and then cast out 2,428, I think.

And then they are all hand-painted, as well.

Which way do you want the shadow?

I don't think it really matters.

I like that shape of that shadow.

I used to take all the photographs of my work myself,

but I'm no professional photographer, so I have since

had them professionally photographed, always almost by the same girl.

Stop!

No, go back a little bit.

Yes, let's try that.

That's nice, actually.

You do get a greater sense of the spiral if you look at it on there.

I have to let go of it once it has left the studio,

I can't follow it around for the rest of its life,

so I think it's important to send it on its way as best you can.

I have peaks and troughs all the time, you know,

I have these crazy highs where I think, well, everything's going

so well, I am on top of the world, I can do no wrong

and then the next day I will wake up feeling miserable,

thinking that it is all just a big fluke,

and everyone is going to wake up to the fact that I am just a con artist.

Which is obviously not how I feel about myself most of the time,

but then you get these moments of huge confidence crisis,

when you think, "What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?

"Who's it for? What's the point?"

But, somehow, I am compelled to carry on doing it.

I will generally always take on a little bit more work than

I think I can do.

I'm almost always in a position of feeling that there are not

enough hours in the day to do things.

So, the wire that has come out of my false neck

I have got to glue into the back of the skull here.

Once it is set, I will turn the skin back the right way

round again, over the body, over the form.

It's tricky, this part, because you're trying to get the widest

point of the skull through quite a narrow aperture in the neck.

So, you can see that it starts to take shape at this point,

and it's really just a question of pinning things in place,

padding things out, bending wires, stitching it up

and modelling the head and giving it a good dry,

and it will look like a bird again.

But, all of that finishing off is something you have to be quite

fresh for, and it's something I have learned never to do

that at the end of the day, because I need patience for it,

and I really need to be quite sharp, so I've generally,

if I have been working on a bird in the day,

I will quite often leave it at this point,

come back to it the next morning when I feel a bit fresher.

I'm just putting in my studio freezer alongside a few other

bits of food because I'm too lazy to go into the stockroom.

If I'm doing something repetitively,

I start to dream about it as I am going to sleep.

I often have weird images come to mind as I am drifting off.

I do quite often dream that I am working on a bird and it comes

to life and attacks me.

WINGS FLAPPING

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