joseph scissorhands: Polly Morgan: How to Behave at Home

Sunday 1 November 2020

Polly Morgan: How to Behave at Home

Polly Morgan - Understand Your Audience, (detail)

"Confined to our homes this spring, communicating via binary code, engaging with friends, lovers and family in two-dimensional hyper-reality, our avatars have taken over, increasingly shaped by the rapidly evolving social strictures that dictate or lives" - Polly Morgan

"Social media and the COVID pandemic provide the context for new abstract sculptures that use the highly decorative hides of snakes and the trompe l'oeil designs in nail artistry to comment on the disparity between surface and reality. In an age where our digital selves are experienced by more people than our physical selves, Morgan uses veneers as a metaphor to examine our need to contain, control and conceal. The exhibition takes as its title an admonition from a book on Victorian etiquette, and in her juxtapositions of animal forms constrained within man-made structures, the artist highlights the unavoidable creep of nature in our lives and the impossibility of absolute restraint. Corset-like concrete and cast polystyrene structures struggle to contain taxidermy snakes that contort and spill from openings, alluding to the distorting effect that social media has on our physical selves."

Polly Morgan: How to Behave at Home, installation view

I made a first visit to the Bomb Factory Art Foundation to see these sinuous, serpentine sculptures with a range of highly tactile surfaces, in this exhibition by sculptor Polly Morgan. Though usually known for the use of taxidermy in her work, appearances here are deceptive, as the snakes exhibited here are polyurethane replicas which still look startlingly real. The concrete blocks and polystyrene packaging blocks which house the writhing, knotted bodies of the serpents are also not quite what they seem to be. The contrasting shiny and hard surface textures, as well as the natural and artificial nature of the materials and subjects makes for some very interesting juxtapositions. The large-scale photographs of Morgan's hands with ubiquitous decorative fake nails flaying actual snakes to reveal the tender flesh underneath are strangely visceral and erotically charged.