Artist Polly Borland on quitting the camera to create defiant sculptures
She’s photographed Queen Elizabeth II, Nick Cave and Cate Blanchett. But the acclaimed Australian photographer is putting the camera down for her latest exhibition.
Polly Borland is angry. We talk for an hour and much of the time is filled with her rage and despair at the atrocities happening in the world right now. It adds perspective and makes the discussion around her art even more poignant and intense. The good, the horrific, the silenced. The fear and injustice that touches the soul of her creativity.
As we speak, Borland is working on a new series of soft sculptures – an oxymoron since they’re cast from aluminum – for a show called Puffs that will open in Melbourne this month at her gallery Sullivan+Strumpf. Puffs is a light, ephemeral word, especially when compared to global politics. The exhibition’s sculptures are the most lifelike she has created so far. They’re formed around a live person and scanned in real time, “because the person can’t live in them forever”. These Puffs have extra puffy heads. Their carbuncles and contusions are thought bubbles perhaps, maybe even explosive rage. Thought upon thought is piled on these Puffs, a note to humanity to think before we destroy each other.
“There’s a creative logic – it’s about what it is to be human,” the 66-year-old artist says. “There’s a puzzle. People have to figure out what they’re looking at and sometimes they don’t get the answers, but it works for me on a visual level. It’s about the body and there’s usually some sort of erotic element, but that’s always present in my work, including the photographs.”
Borland hopes her work – first, as an acclaimed photographer and now as a visual artist – evokes some kind of emotional response, but isn’t too concerned with how people perceive it themselves.
“My whole way of interpreting the world was visual,” she says of her childhood in Melbourne. “I remember lying in bed and we had these really complicated Marimekko flowery curtains. My mum loved them. I remember looking at the fabric for hours, trying to figure out the pattern.
I loved art from an early age and, towards the end of high school, loved art history. But in Australia, in those days, you had to do a practical art, and I didn’t feel I was good at drawing or painting.”
A teacher encouraged her to start taking photographs and it became her passion. She (the teacher) built a dark room in a cupboard at school, and graduated with a diploma in photography from Melbourne’s Prahran College in 1983. “I never looked back,” she remembers. “I never thought I would put the camera down, I was so in love with it. But I have put the camera down. I don’t think it’s forever [but], at the moment, I don’t have anything to photograph.”
Her photography was always provocative. Rich and wonderful, it has a glossy candour and, perhaps, an underlying sense of disturbia, with its surreal and distinctive use of pantyhose, stuffing and props. All has carried over to Puffs. Borland famously photographed Queen Elizabeth II standing in front of a grey floral Marimekko backdrop. She has worked with Nick Cave on multiple projects, as well as Susan Sontag, Cate Blanchett and Gwendoline Christie, with whom she worked on the Bunny series (2004-5) and a book called Bunny.
“Pretty early on I said to Gwendoline, ‘You know that you’re gonna have to take your clothes off?’” says Borland. “It was about subverting the male objectification of women, through the female gaze, and Gwen thought long and hard about it before she agreed. We built up a lot of trust and then she did it, and then really the whole thing became very free.”
The entire Bunny series, inspired by the original pin-up and photographer Bunny Yeager, took around five years to create. “We were really proud of it,” Borland continues. “She showed her then boyfriend, who was totally horrified at the photos. He’d never seen her like that, and he found it really confronting. That was the first chink in her doubt. A few other people saw it in a professional capacity before she ever made it into Game of Thrones and their reactions were not positive. I think that made her even more sort of self-conscious and doubt the work.”
When Borland produced large-scale photographs of her own naked body for Nudie (2021), “it was the ending”, she admits, of photography for her. “I thought I needed to put myself on the line. I did and it was really hard, and it dawned on me I was doing what I’d done to other people.” It’s why she put down her camera. If she were to photograph again it wouldn’t be for just anyone. Her subjects would have to matter and be people who make a difference. She would like to photograph human rights campaigners like international lawyer Francesca Albanese.
A later project, the collaborative Playpen (2023) with Penny Slinger, was equally excoriating. “Her work’s incredible,” Borland says. “Her early work was fearless and conceptual, kind of surreal and really amazing. I ended up being the naked model again. It wasn’t me taking the photos, it was me being photographed by somebody else. I completely relinquished any real agency I had … And then we did a show in New York and it was really hard. That was harder than me doing the photos of myself and then I really understood why Gwen felt so exposed.”
Her examination of the human body evolved into something tactile. During the pandemic, while living in Byron Bay, she was introduced to Urban Art Projects (UAP), a creative studio that brings large-scale art and architecture concepts to life, by fellow artist Karla Dickens. “When I first met Dan [Tobin, co-founder and creative director of UAP] he said to me, ‘I’ve got a copy of the Morph book,’ which was a show I’d done at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2018.” In this exhibition, alongside images from Bunny, Borland exhibited photographs of stuffed and stockinged bodies, both fleshy and surreal. “He said, ‘You’ve been making sculpture [and] photographing it. We wanna take the sculpture out of the photographs and into the real world.’”
At the UAP foundry in Brisbane, the team brings 3D scanned versions of her model forms to life. In 2020, UAP constructed five 60-centimetre sculptures for Bod (2022), using a lost wax-casting technique finished with automotive paint. A further one-off rendition was made. Called BOD (2023), this monumental two-metre-tall sculpture spent two years in Texas’s Marfa desert. BOD’s towering, fleshy form – with its glimmers of a human body – will next appear at Frieze Los Angeles in 2026.
Borland is using the same method – stuffing stockings on models that are then 3D scanned – as her previous sculptural work to create Puffs. The new works will be constructed from diverse mediums – under discussion are stone, wood, glass and powder-coated aluminum. The arms will be more prominent. On some models an actual human arm, without the protrusions of stuffing, can be seen.
We speak about other artists who inspire her. The most influential, Borland shares, are the late Moroccan French artist Nicola L, Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow and the 90-year-old British sculptor William G Tucker. All have examined the body – or, rather, the human condition – in similarly abstract and, at times, confronting ways.
We are talking on Zoom and she shares the view, looking out over trees and nature to the mountains, from her post-and-beam mid-century house on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. She has a studio, which she describes as a concrete box with huge windows, in the city’s downtown. She has loved living here for the past 12 years, but has found the recent political climate hard work. Her husband, John Hillcoat, is a writer and director of films,documentaries and music videos. Her son, Louie Hillcoat, aka Sleepie Louie, is a musician. “He does music and he’s incredible. He’s probably more incredible than any of the family,” Borland says, proudly. “We’re a family of artists and he’s 24 and pursuing his music life. He’s obsessed by music and an incredible performer.” Her son’s love of music, she says, comes from his dad. (Although Borland also loves it, she mainly works in silence.)
We discuss what’s next. “I need to push myself and go into situations that are kind of difficult,” she muses. “Maybe one day I will do a performance piece myself. I think the pushing is always the best thing, isn’t it? The uneasiness.”
Puffs shows at Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne from November 27 until December 20.
This story is from the August issue of Vogue Australia.
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