6 minute read
Polly Borland: Metamorphosis
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Sep-Nov 2023
Polly Borland's unsettling, misshapen forms have long been threatening to break free from the picture plane. Her famed lenticular prints and tapestries were already testing the limits of two dimensions years ago. Now, in the leadup to her upcoming exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney in November her work has taken on a monumental shift, finally morphing into life.
By Claire Summers
Polly Borland is a force. Not one that oppresses, but one that propels forward. The artist has spent her celebrated career crafting a distinctive and disruptive visual language, one contradictory in its ability to simultaneously shock and soothe, disturb and exhilarate. Encountering Borland’s work is to be met first with a kind of obscurity. It is not her intention or desire that what you see can or should be immediately understood. Rather, she encourages the viewer’s inquisition, their participation in the work’s essence through questioning, tracing the edges of the puzzle to find how they fit a larger narrative of meaning. Borland’s work is intentionally unsettling, at least initially. Turgid, morphed, misshapen, globous, almost alien forms stand or slump before us. The urge to flinch is as strong as the one to prod. Yet beneath the skin of her creatures, both in her imagery and sculpture, stirs something deeply human. The artist’s invitation to look further inevitably generates questions not only of the work but of ourselves, of the self we see reflected to us. It is this lingering hint of the human that draws us closer, and closer still.
Attempts to interpret Borland’s work through logic or rationale are futile. The anatomies before us have placed one foot in figuration, the other in abstraction and asked us to navigate the tension between the two with instinct, rather than reason. Neither the figurative nor the abstract elements of Borland’s work offer a neat or absolute answer to the work’s meaning. Borland’s practice bears several motifs–disrupting the traditional portrait, surrealist composition, taboo inclinations–and her recent work across both photography and sculpture meditate on the body. Borland flirts with the edge of what the body is capable of, what is possible when it is abstracted further and further beyond recognition. It feels defined by an attraction to (rather than avoidance of) limits. They function not a as deterrent, but as motivator. The prelude of Borland’s work, the creative logic that precedes the making of the work itself, ruminates on the body’s vulnerability. “In all my work, I don't censor,” she states. “I don't censor or limit how far I'm prepared to go in order to achieve the end result.” Borland’s work ultimately is an act of defiance, honouring vulnerability by harnessing it as strength.
In all my work, I don't censor. I don't censor or limit how far I'm prepared to go in order to achieve the end result.
In recent bodies of photographic work, notably the Morph and Nudies series, Borland makes proposals on the body through her decisions on what is concealed and what is revealed. Each of these series, though distinct from one another, bear the same sculptural qualities that define her 3D works today. In the Morph series, the artist encases her subject–a human figure–in stocking and begins the process of abstracting them, of defamiliarising the viewer with their form. Borland reduces and rebuilds, filling the stockings with bulbous growths or padding them out into contorted silhouettes until they almost depart all semblance of their original form. In this sense, the artist is already a sculptor, uses her hands to shape and mould her subject.
In Nudies, Borland reveals all, photographing her own naked bodies, in a manner that dispenses with both modesty and the desire to flatter. Here, Borland uses her own flesh to use the language of abstraction and the gestures of sculpture. In discussing this body of work, Borland directs me to Lana Turner Journal, a smallcirculation magazine out of California that publishes “poetry & opinion” – two forms of writing so often at odds with one another. Issue 15 features an interview between Borland and the journal’s editor Cal Bedient. Bedient’s questions to the artist dispense with the need for brevity, luxuriating in language (as poet’s often do) to create an astounding visual sense of Borland’s recent photographic work, of the inherent challenge the artist posits, of the poetics in the grotesque. The effect is ekphrastic1: “‘Nudie’ […] advertises in advance that the nudes are not classical examples of the genre (far from it), but instead, bypassing any pretense of opulence, display heavy flesh with almost a spotive show of confidence, an in-youreyes self-display, menacingly squeezing this or dangling that. The photographs are like sections of some hardly imaginable whole. They do not so much defamiliarize the
nude as mock its intention to charm, cutting a zone of unidealized flesh across it, female matter not female beauty. So, they require a difficult adjustment. They command and crowd the frame and are formidable in not holding anything back while ambiguating what is put forward.”
Borland notes that both these series–Morph and Nudies–are the templates for the sculptures that appear in her forthcoming exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf, written with the same visual language but spoken through different materiality. Today, her figures have stepped out of the frame to stand before us. “I'm exploring,” she says. “I don't want everything to look the same. I'm trying to create and develop as I go along.” As with the Morph series, Borland encases a human figure in stockings and proceeds to distort them with growths and misshapen appendages. It is here where she pivots. Rather than photographing the creature, she creates a digital 3D model–the blueprint from which the sculpture is built. This move into sculpture seems predestined on reflection: Borland was realising her photographs in 3 dimensions long before the shift was defined, even to her. The artist’s famed lenticular prints2 and tapestries–presented not mounted on a wall but in the centre of a room so that one could circle them–were already exercises in escaping the two-dimensional.
It was once suggested to me by a lecturer at university that to stay the same is to experience loss. This moment in Borland’s practice is monumental. The sense of forward momentum, the resistance to the loss of staying the same, is profound. This new body of work, forthcoming to Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney in November, presents both new sculptural forms and images that deepen the artist’s relationship to working in the third dimension, propelling her ever forward.
POLLY BORLAND
16 NOVEMBER – 16 DECEMBER
SULLIVAN+STRUMPF EORA/SYDNEY
EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW
