Beasts and birds in the afterlife. Taxidermy sculptures by Polly Morgan

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When a beloved animal or bird dies, when you have to put your pet to sleep, when a wild animal dies under the wheels of a transport, which has jumped out onto the track, it is very insulting and sad to tears. Usually people seek to bury the animal, providing it with at least some decent last refuge. But the artist Polly Morgan offers a different way out. She turns the carcasses of dead animals into taxidermy sculpturespresenting them in very unusual and unusual roles. It all sounds strange, but it looks quite artistic and even picturesque. Polly Morgan lives and works in London. It may seem that she is indifferent to animals, or even completely insensitive and cold as a concrete wall, but in fact the girl adores animals, and she herself has a dog, Stafford named Trotsky. Therefore, the artist treats her work with trepidation, and in her sculptures she seeks to preserve animals and birds as they were during life. But not to recreate their natural habitat, but, on the contrary, to present them in a new image, a new role, so that their owners would look differently at their pet now, after death. Polly Morgan's art project is called - Life After Death.

Strange, eccentric, sometimes crazy and ridiculous, but still original, interesting and even funny sculptures of the artist do not cause any negative. They are not filled with piercing longing for the lost animal, they do not look like terrifying zombie monsters, but simply … they live their lives after death within the framework of the role that the author of the project gave them. So, birds can recline on pedestals in glass "mansions" -capsules, like a sleeping beauty, lift a heavy cage into the air, relieving themselves of an iron captivity, and even look out of the telephone receiver, explaining the interference on the line that had to be endured using analog phones. And animals, mainly small rodents, are presented in the images of shy kids who seek to attract less attention and take up less space … But still they are located where it is difficult not to notice them, and occupy places that are not intended for them at all.

All the animals, down to the very last chick and mouse, did not die on the table in the preparatory room, and not at all at the hands of Polly Morgan. They are brought either by the saddened owners, trusting the artist to give the pet a second life, turning its carcass into a sculpture, or she uses corpses that died from accidents, or by natural death. You can get acquainted with the work of Polly Morgan (Polly Morgan) on her website.