Biography

‘Strikingly independent…her art says something genuinely insightful about the modern world’ – Waldemar Januszczak writing in The Sunday Times

‘There may not be an elegant term for the jangling, queasy, uncanny chills induced by certain combinations of materials and textures, but by God does Polly Morgan understand the territory.’ – Hettie Judah writing in The Guardian

‘Simultaneously excruciating, outrageous and savagely erotic’ Louisa Buck writing in The Art Newspaper

Polly Morgan (b.1980) is a British artist living and working in London. Self-taught with no formal education in art, Polly Morgan works in taxidermy, concrete and polyurethane. She is interested in creating deceptions, with sculptural facsimiles made from painted casts and skin, as a way of exploring false narratives in our increasingly polarised and digitised society.

Social media and the Covid pandemic provide the context for her latest work, for which she uses the decorative hides of snakes and the trompe l’oeil designs in nail artistry to probe the disparity between surface and reality. Snakes in the sculptures, painted and coated in powders and transfers used to decorate human nails, contort to fit casts of polystyrene packaging, gripping or spilling from openings in the forms. Snug or squashed in, they evoke either cosiness or claustrophobia and allude to our own containment and possible over-protection during lockdown.

She is persistently drawn to the deceptive qualities of veneers; used to conceal or protect something less desirable or durable, and of snakes’ skins; designed to provide camouflage or to imitate more deadly breeds. In this context our edited and filtered online selves can be interpreted as products of a natural instinct to nurture misleading perceptions in order to assimilate and avoid crowd censure. Titled after face-altering apps, her photographs of snakes’ skins, being peeled back by hands clad in artificial fingernails, hint at the subterranean life that exists beneath all things.

ACCOLADES:

Selected Exhibitions

Public Collections

• The New Art Gallery Walsall
• Zabludowicz Collection
• Thomas Olbricht ME Collectors Room
• David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF)
• Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) Exeter
• The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) Washington DC, USA

Private Collections

• Ömer Koç
• Vanessa Branson
• Didier Casimiro
• Ivor Braka