21st July – 25th September
Haunch of Venison: 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am – 6pm; Saturday, 10am – 5pm
Animals have had a bit of a tough time in modern art. They have been dissected and submerged in formaldehyde by Hirst, impaled to a wall by Kounellis, squashed and frozen by Collishaw. Now Polly Morgan is getting in on the act, skinning, slicing and stuffing her victims in the name of art. Morgan, who I must point out is a fully fledged member of the Guild of Taxidermists, is the latest wonder kid on the British art scene. Unusually, she has found both critical acclaim and substantial financial reward from her work without having exhibited in many shows. In fact Psychopomps is her first solo show at a major London gallery, and even it is a relatively small affair, with just four sculptures on show.
The theme of the show is the afterlife, unsurprising given the fact that all of Morgan’s subjects are all dead. Psychopomps are the creatures or spirits that are believed by many religions to guide the souls of the deceased in the afterlife. These creatures have been depicted at different times and in different cultures as horses, ravens, dogs, crows and sparrows. In Morgan’s show, however, these creatures are always birds: pigeons, crows, cardinals, finches and canaries.
Blue Fever, is a spherical mass of pigeon wings, with each gray wing fully outstretched and pointed outwards from the centre of the sculpture. Looking at the piece up close it is obvious that the wings didn’t belong to the type of dishevelled pigeons we are used to seeing in London, but rather to the well-fed sort of birds found in the country and hunted for pies, the kind of birds that you would trust with your soul. Black Fever, as its name suggests is an almost identical piece, except that it is made up of crow wings and is black in colour. The two pieces are bizarre apparitions, clouds of wings that represent the flight of the soul through the various stages of the afterlife.
These two pieces hang from the ceiling either side of the centrepiece and the largest sculpture in the room, Systemic Inflammation. Measuring 130 x 113 x 113cm it is actually a smaller replica of Morgan’s most well-known piece, Departures, which sold for £85,000 earlier in the year. Whereas the original featured an assortment of birds strapped to a brass bird cage, Systemic Inflammation features just two types of birds – finches and canaries – strapped to a steel cage. The yellow birds are captured in various stages of flight, making it look like the tiny creatures are somehow carrying the steel contraption through the air in a strange reversal of the role of cage and captor.
By far my favourite piece in the exhibition, however, is Atrial Flutter: a bright red cardinal encased in a rib cage and tied to a series of brightly coloured balloons. The bird is perfectly positioned inside the ribcage to be mistaken for the heart, its colour particularly vivid given the absence of red amongst the blue, green, purple, orange and yellow balloons. Unlike the other sculptures suspended from the ceiling, this one has no wings and its flight through the air is entirely dependent on the course of the wind.
Morgan has a talent it would seem for resurrecting the dead. I’m not just talking about the animals in her pieces but also the skill of taxidermy itself, something that I would not have previously considered to be art, or indeed wanted to look at in a gallery. But Morgan’s strange and mysterious creations have changed all that. They make art out of death, making you forget that you are looking at a corpse, allowing to suspend your imagination and believe you have entrered some kind of magical land where birds carry their cages instead of sitting in them and red cardinals are what keep the blood circulating round your body. Her sculptures are imaginative and entirely bizarre and the beauty of seeing them in Haunch of Venison is that you can view them from above or below. The only complaint I can find with this exhibition is that it is far too small, but then I suppose that just leaves you wanting to find out more about this wonderful new artist.
