The following excerpts from the April 2008 issue of Telegraph Magazine highlight the object-making aspect of taxidermy, which is exactly what makes Morgan’s work compelling. By repositioning the prepared animal away from naturalism and science, these tableaux reveal them as purely material, as jarringly unnatural. Since there is no attempt to give them any kind of animation through dramatic posing or by recreating their natural habitat, they become props, and as such they emphasize the purgatory that is central to the weirdness about taxidermy: the thing is dead, but does not decay.
It is best not to look in Polly Morgan’s freezer. She has several, actually: the normal one, containing peas and ice cubes, and another two that are considerably more Patricia Cornwell. Crammed in against the Arctic silt of her chest freezer are countless Ziploc bags full of “deads”: squirrels, guinea pigs and, wrapped in a black bin-liner, a dog that a friend found still warm and apparently ownerless under a bridge in a local park. In the other, a freezer cabinet, there is a barn owl and a slash of jade-burnished pigeons and lovebirds, whose bright, multi-coloured plumage glows brightly through the frosted polythene. “They look like little sweets, don’t they?” she says appreciatively, slamming the door shut.
Near the end of the profile, she details how a bird is mounted:
“You lie the pigeon on its back. You make the incision down the breast: there’s not a lot of blood, because the heart’s not pumping. You have to disconnect the bones at the shoulder and the hip, and then you peel the whole thing inside out like a jacket, scrape it out and remove all the fat pockets at the base of the feathers: it’s really time-consuming and boring, but you have to do that, otherwise the skin will rot and the feathers will fall out. Then you paint the skin with Bird Tanning Solution, which effectively turns it into leather. Then you make a body from wood wool, like the stuff that plates are packed up in, and hemp, which is insulation used by plumbers, for padding out the neck. Cut the back of the neck off, scrape the brains and the skull out, and then you glue that wire into the back of the skull, and peel it all the right way round again.
Polly Morgan [via feuilleton]