Polly morgan taxidermy

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,

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