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:
2021 Winner of the Royal Society of Sculptors First Plinth public art award.
2016 Selected by Lord Melvyn Bragg to design and create 13 awards for the winners of the Sky Southbank Arts Awards.
2014 Selected to represent Britain in Women to Watch 2015, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC.