There’s something ethereal about London-based taxidermist Polly Morgan. The 37-year-old’s elfin features belie the fact that her work involves dealing with the dead, but that’s what has made her one of British Art’s integral figures. Morgan’s works have caught the attention of millions, including Courtney Love, Kate Moss and the Mittals, thanks to her unique reverence for all creatures.
Ethical thinking
The Victorian Era, dubbed the Golden Age of Taxidermy, was considered a time of education for people who couldn’t get close to animals in real life. Unfortunatelty for taxidermy, it came to be associated with the gentry and hunting, which tarnished taxidermists’ reputations for epochs to follow. However, a few did have a crudeness to their methods, according to Morgan, who adds it’s good there are more people talking about the field with the reinvention shedding light on ethical taxidermy. Today, there are international bodies in place which monitor the practises. An animal-lover herself, Morgan sources her “raw material” from animals that died of natural causes. “People would often react with surprise when I say I’m an animal lover,” she laughs, “It’s as if I’ve gone into taxidermy with a loathing for animals! The question I get asked most frequently is ‘where do you get the animals from?’ which is understandable.”
Sometimes on a Sunday
Many taxidermists come from a place of respect for creatures and it’s something Morgan portrays clearly in her work, whether it is a quail’s head or a behemoth baby giraffe. Her mounted work costs a pretty penny — most starting at £300 and surpassing £80,000.
Art meets life
With the discourse switched up, the face of taxidermy has been rejuvenated; some look to the art form out of a sense of morbid fascination, but for Morgan, it’s a very different set of elements that keeps her engaged.
The slim cultural line Morgan treads between art and taxidermy portrays the risks between the two realms into which her work may fall. “To people who don’t know contemporary art, I’m a taxidermist; and to people who don’t know taxidermy, I’m an artist. My work fits much better in a gallery environment because what I do with the animals is seemingly bad practice in the realm of taxidermy. Sometimes I’ll use just a part of the body, place them in unnatural poses, and those things I suppose are risks in the taxidermy sense.”
A tactile experience
To come up with a technique that works on every skin required a lot of trial and error. Morgan shares that the process had a lot of frustrating moments, explaining it took probably six months in total to just master different techniques with snakes, probably because not too many taxidermists she knows, mount snakes.
In fact, she now finds them easier than a lot of other animals because she’s developed an entirely new technique.
“I love taxidermy because there’s no hard and fast rule about how you do it,” she says, adding there’s a lot of solo trial and error with the work. She recalls speaking to her first tutor in taxidermy, George Jamieson, about a dilemma with snake skins. “I was having trouble making the bodies out of wood and straw and binding it with string. The more you bind it, the more fluid the surface becomes— but never entirely smooth. You’ve obviously only got skin with snakes; when it dries it acts like a shrink wrap so you’re able to see every strand of straw underneath it. Accuracy is needed for these things and, because I was placing the snakes in very dense coils and looping their bodies together, I wasn’t able to stretch a tubular skin over a cast of a body that was tied up in knots. I was having to use a flexible material like silicone and rubber to do the casts.”
For Morgan, the anatomy and physiology of snakes allow for them to be twisted into abstract positions where she can tuck the head away opening it up to formal examination. “When we see the head of a snake, we’re primed to be afraid of them,” she explains.
It can be pleasantly isolating working as a taxidermist, says Morgan, who describes it as “intimate and meditative.” While she does have an assistant whom she appreciates, she equally loves the days alone because the familiarity and the tactile nature of what she does almost centres her with nature. But she’s not too sentimental about her creations — once she’s created something, it’s almost cured her of an interest in it, she says.
Unexpected speedbumps
Not every piece Morgan puts out into the world is received as she expects. Having worked copiously with birds, she explains that there’s far too much significance and cultural associations attached to birds and consequently, people have a very romantic view of them, adding, “Right in the beginning, I enjoyed it and I saw my work as being a visual poem. But then I felt that people were investing more into some of the pieces than I intended, and I wanted to get away from that narrative,” she explains.
Recently, Morgan’s taxidermy converged with virtual reality in a London-based exhibition, ‘Thresholds,’ made in collaboration with her partner, artist Mat Collishaw. The show delved into themes of dissociation issues and provoking boundaries with technologies in unforeseen ways. When asked about what’s next, she says she is currently focussing on using animals skins but not stretched over a form, such as the shape and texture of hedgehog skins. But that’s a project she’s keeping on the down-low until it’s ready.
