Photographer Polly Borland’s Next Move
Famed for her early portrait photography, this Australian artist makes sculptures that defy easy interpretation.
Photographing Queen Elizabeth II was possibly Polly Borland’s most famous – if not finest – hour. Granted just five minutes to shoot Her Majesty for the Golden Jubilee two decades ago, Borland remembers feeling panic-stricken over the time constraints and mysterious royal protocol. She was starstruck and tongue-tied, at one stage on all fours trying to reposition the royal ankles. On the way out, still reeling from the ultra-bright ring flash, the Queen commented, “I think you’ve blinded me.”
Recalling the moment, the 64-year-old Melbourne-raised artist says, “I was just a mess – a bumbling idiot.” Still, she somehow nabbed a winning close-up of the Queen with a gold lamé backdrop, which the monarch approved. Borland now sees the shot as a tool of colonial propaganda – one that hangs in her toilet. It marked the end of an editorial portrait career that saw her snap everyone from Germaine Greer and Kylie Minogue to Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi.
Since then, Borland’s artistic focus has shifted to sculpture, initially pictured in her photographs and more recently as standalone works. “It reignited my imagination,” she explains. “It’s multidimensional in a way that photography can’t be.” Next month, her latest work will be exhibited at Sydney’s Sullivan+Strumpf gallery.
Recognised for her surreal images of models wrapped in bulbous, cotton-stuffed stocking fabric, Borland unveiled BOD earlier this year – a two-metre-tall cast-aluminium abstracted figure of a human clad in her signature padding – as part of the Marfa Invitational art fair in the West Texas desert. Viewers point to feminist overtones in her strange, compelling works but she says that she never intends to say anything in particular. “They’re like puzzle pieces that you have to keep looking at to figure out. I don’t think my work is for the faint-hearted.”
Exhibited at: National Portrait Gallery, London and Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Station Gallery, Melbourne; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
What the experts say: “Polly’s work can be unsettling and that’s the great strength of it… [She] has developed an aesthetic and an intuition that draws that slightly uncanny sense out of images.” – Pip Wallis, former curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria.
Image credit: Simon Schluter
