Polly Borland: Everything I want to be when I grow up

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PoLLY BoRLAND Everything II want want to to be be when I grow grow up up

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First published in 2012 by The University of Queensland Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Polly Borland: Everything I want to be when I grow up 1 September – 25 November 2012 ISBN

978-1-74272-048-7 – PAPERBACK

© 2012 The University of Queensland, the artist and authors.

Views expressed in the publication are not necessarily those of the publisher.

This publication is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced by any means or process without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to locate the holders of copyright and reproduction rights of all images reproduced in this publication. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any reader with further information.

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Contents Director’s Message: Campbell Gray

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Foreword: Peter Milne

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Playing fancy dress: Alison Kubler

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Polly Borland Interview: Ignacio Andreu

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The Babies

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Bunny

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Smudge

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Pupa 112 List of works 122 Bios

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Acknowledgements

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Director’s Message On the surface it may appear that a great distance exists between Borland’s commercial portraits and her more idiosyncratic images, but it is not so. Borland is intently focused on people, their outward appearance and personae and, at the same time, their self-image, their doubts and insecurities, and the more fundamental psychologies of personality. Often working with close and equally creative associates, Borland explores private questions of identity from the inside out, and turns her lens on the complex and the ineffable. Looking at these images is at once a deeply engaging and a somewhat repulsive experience, both conditions activated by a sense that our deepest self-doubts have been exposed for all to see.

With the superficial and the artificial being increasingly emphasised in our modern society, the distance between public appearance and the intimate is rapidly increasing. Borland plunges into that widening space and wrestles with both ends at once, thereby collapsing the dichotomy, and forcing each to acknowledge the other’s existence.

This publication and the exhibition that it accompanies provide the UQ Art Museum with a valuable opportunity to foreground the work of an important Australian photographer and, at the same time, to explore these complex personal conditions. I am grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Polly Borland, and for the research and organisation brought to the project by its curator, Alison Kubler. They have each given much of themselves to enable this significant project to occur. I thank Borland’s Australian dealer Murray White, who has assisted the project, and acknowledge the generosity of those private collectors who have loaned works to the exhibition.

Alison Kubler has been assisted by Chrissa Stilianos, a UQ student intern, and we thank Chrissa for her contribution to the project. Valuable grants have been received from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and the Gordon Darling Foundation, and my sincere thanks go to these funding bodies. And I am constantly in awe of my talented and dedicated colleagues here at the UQ Art Museum, who quietly and capably accomplish remarkable results.

Campbell Gray Director, UQ Art Museum

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Foreword I suppose it could be argued that Polly Borland is subversive.

It is certainly true that her commercial work confounds expectations with images that are gorgeously seductive yet also quietly sinister and this strange synthesis is even more pronounced in her personal photomedia work.

My usual response to Borland’s photographs is an immediate attraction to their (sometimes garish) beauty but then I often find myself questioning my own judgement because there is always something ‘wrong’ about her images.

Often it is an obvious dissonance between visual language and subject matter - images of adult ‘babies’ shot like a fashion spread; the silly, frivolous humour of the Smudge project that makes me laugh then makes me want to cry myself to sleep when I realise it’s actually about self-loathing; or the fetish porn of the BUNNY series that somehow manages to borrow from the visual language of children’s books (‘Miffy the Rabbit Does Dallas’?). However, there’s something more going on in these projects than mere juxtaposition of unexpected elements.

This assertion is based on close observation. Over the last three decades, I have been with Polly many times while she is making photographs yet I am always surprised when I see the images that result. I remind myself that I was there, standing next to her in the studio or on the street but I am constantly made aware that what I saw happening in front of her camera was clearly not what she saw.

These images are the work of someone who sees things differently to the rest of us and wants to show us what we are missing.

Peter Milne July 2012

My personal view is that Borland is not in fact a subversive artist, at least not the kind that makes dialectic statements in visual form. She does not engage in analytical evaluations of her viewing audience so that simple 180 degree inversions can be created to challenge their preconceptions.

I think Borland makes images that genuinely reflect the way she sees the world (and I don’t mean ‘see’ in a figurative sense). I am convinced this is literally what reality looks like to her.

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“‘Hold still’, says Polly, then SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! And there you have it. Polly has stolen from me that

moment when I have forgotten who I am and all that I

wish to be. Magically she has rendered herself absent and I am alone.”15 Nick Cave

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Playing fancy dress: Alison Kubler I was studying art history at this hippie school … but I couldn’t draw, so they said, ‘Why don’t you make your own dark room?’ At around the same time, I saw the work of Diane Arbus and Weegee, and a little bit later an exhibition of Larry Clark’s work. They were these photographs of kids on the edge, shooting up – dressing up. They were just tacked to the walls with drawing pins. I knew then that that was what I wanted to do.1

Polly Borland is one of Australia’s most successful artists, although she is not widely known in her homeland. Her photographic practice has straddled commercial, photographic documentary and fine art practice, and is characterised by an edgy sensibility that lends her images tension and resonance. She has created some of the bestknown images in our collective consciousness, and her work has featured in leading international journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Independent and Dazed & Confused, among others. She has shot album covers for Goldfrapp, lent her images to Nick Cave for the cover of his book The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel 2009, and been fêted with awards, such as the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, which she won in 1994. Her subjects have ranged from the illustrious, the great and good to the quirky. They include prominent Australians, such as those featured in her series Australians 2000, among them Germaine Greer, Sir Les Patterson aka Barry Humphries, and Cate Blanchett, through to practicing infantilists, the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary essay, The Babies. Her portraits of Indigenous Australians for Granta magazine’s 2000 issue, dedicated to Australia, demonstrated a willingness to engage politically.

A deep empathy characterises her work, which makes little distinction between fame (Kylie Minogue) and infamy (Monica Lewinsky): every

subject is considered and respected. In 2001, she was honoured as one of only eight photographers selected to create portraits of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, for The Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

Everything I want to be when I grow up examines the last fifteen years of Borland’s practice bringing together Australians, The Babies, Bunny, Smudge, and her most recent work, Pupa.

Australians I usually start with an idea, smudge, or subject matter, like adult babies or Gwen in Bunny, and explore the ideas and subject matter on an aesthetic level and emotional level. Each shot is a part of a greater body of work and each session helps gather more images and helps clarify along the way ideas and aesthetic approaches and choices.2

Borland’s larger oeuvre represents an exercise in the study of portraiture. From the photographs of famous faces that form Australians, through to The Babies, and even Bunny and Smudge, what emerges is a complex and intelligent study of the contemporary portrait and its broader function, even while the artist seeks to erode convention by adopting a strategy of what we could call antiportraiture. Borland often creates images that appear to deny the subject both their likeness, and any exposure of their ‘true’ character.

Her iconic portrait of a naked Germaine Greer is one of the key images in Australians, a series documenting prominent Australians living in the United Kingdom, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2000, and exhibited that same year at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Despite her willingness to disrobe (it was apparently Greer’s suggestion), Greer went on to denigrate and lambast the image, possibly

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out of embarrassment. The artist was disappointed

by Greer’s pubic disavowal of the portrait, because she had been a willing participant. Borland was hurt by the exchange, her respect for her subject challenged by the ungracious outburst. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, it remains one of Borland’s bestknown photographs.

Her portrait of Cate Blanchett from the same series, captures the actress in an unfamiliar state: unadorned and, seemingly, without makeup. The portrait has taken on a greater resonance as Blanchett’s star has continued to rise; Blanchett has since been photographed by some of the most highly regarded photographers in the world, including Annie Leibovitz. Borland’s portraits of Natalie Imbruglia and Toni Colette, from the same series, capture their subjects in a similar raw state, almost vulnerable. By deliberately thwarting and deflating the image of celebrity, Borland creates a tension between what is concealed and what is revealed. She denies these famous faces the façade of ‘makeup’, shooting her subjects up close, sans improvement. In contrast, when Borland photographs non-celebrities, that is, everyday subjects, she uses makeup and costuming to transform them into extraordinary, almost otherworldly, beings.

Australians also features two portraits of Barry Humphries, one of him as he appears out of character, and the other in character as Les Patterson, the larrikin that Humphries created to comment satirically on Australia’s apparent disavowal of culture. Borland’s decision to photograph Humphries as Patterson seated on a toilet irreverently waving an Australian flag, points to her interest in camouflage, role-playing and the suspension of self. Humphries, who at the time of writing is about to retire his most famous creation and national treasure, Dame Edna Everage, is the consummate performance artist whose colourful cast of characters are intermediaries through which he explores his national identity.

With Australians, Borland was well qualified to

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cast her gaze on her compatriots by virtue of her own outsider status. In 1989, Borland left Australia for Britain, where she lived in Brighton until recently moving to Los Angeles with her filmmaker husband, John Hillcoat, and young son, Louie.

This extended absence from Australia, coupled with the artist’s reluctance to appear in front of the camera, has contributed to Borland’s low profile in her home country: we can’t quite put a face to the name…

On the subject of artistic influence, Borland has said, Diane Arbus was very influential as was Larry Clark when I first started taking photos. Both photographers work served as inspiration and revelation to me. These two artists gave me the bravery to continue to take risks in my own practice.

I love Paul Klee and some of Picasso, Andy Warhol and some of Cindy Sherman. Film makers have been hugely influential – Pasolini and Bresson – and film in general has been a source of inspiration to me personally.3

Borland shares aesthetic territory with American artist Cindy Sherman’s early work, in which costumes or disguises are more haphazard, cobbled together from her studio surrounds, and clearly the product of a small budget, a vivid imagination and an interest in cinema. Both artists recognise the power of the projected self, but the self as reduced, obfuscated, obscured, disguised and mediated. In the case of Sherman, we see the artist play-acting her many possible selves, part of her project beginning to examine representations of women. The personas she creates become metaphoric avatars.

Whereas Sherman employs a narrative predicated on art-historical or cinematic tropes, Borland’s images are less didactic, more free-form. She constructs images as she goes, dressing up her models as though they are playing at fancy dress, so that the resulting images have a random, almost serendipitous quality. Moreover, unlike Sherman, Borland almost never appears as the

subject in her own photographs. She features in one photograph from Bunny, and is pictured in hospital garb in Australians, her face obscured by a mask. Even in person, the artist is a study in camouflage. She regularly changes the colour and style of her hair, and wears large glasses that have a disconcerting mirror-like effect, as though she were consciously deflecting your gaze.

The Queen When Borland was invited to photograph Queen Elizabeth II in 2001, she was given strict time parameters, so the artist worked with two simple backgrounds, one of gold lamé, and the other, a piece of blue and white Marimekko fabric. The resulting two portraits capture The Queen in both blinding glory and whimsy. Here is Her Majesty in a moment of rare candour, smiling and relaxed, looking directly at the camera.

Tightly cropped, the gold Queen evokes religious icons. Borland has employed the lamé (a pictorial device she has used in previous work, such as her famous image of Monica Lewinsky) to the same effect as hand-applied gold leaf in paintings of saints and martyrs. The technique imbues Her Majesty with the Madonna’s aura, almost as though Borland were acknowledging the regent’s beatific nature and benevolence. Indeed, one is reminded of the way that Queen Elizabeth I deliberately restyled herself as an absolute power, adopting the moniker The Virgin Queen (married to England), and presenting herself physically as a white goddess, literally painting her face white in the fashion of the day, but also to suggest her virginity and purity. In adopting this costume, Queen Elizabeth I clearly recognised the strategic power of image in the collective conscience.

Borland’s gold image of Queen Elizabeth II is imbued with a tongue-in-cheek, albeit respectful, humour. In a Warholian gesture, she captures the ‘brand’ image of The Queen, while subverting it gently with kitsch glitz and excess. This is The Queen as she has never been seen before – a

little bit disco. It is a fond gesture and ultimately very Australian. We might even see Borland’s portrait through the prism of the Republican movement, by virtue of her slightly irreverent approach.

Within this exhibition, Borland’s images of The Queen – the most photographed woman in contemporary history – are displayed alongside the aforementioned early portrait of Cate Blanchett. A contemporary audience will inevitably view the two portraits through the wider lens of popular culture. Blanchett twice played The Queen’s most famous relative and namesake, Queen Elizabeth I, to great acclaim in the films Elizabeth 1998 and Elizabeth: The Golden Age 2007. Queen Elizabeth II is at once monarch and celebrity, just as Blanchett is a celebrity and, on screen, a monarch.

Borland’s aesthetic might be described as typically Australian with its stereotypically ‘laconic’ awareness of self-identity, distinctive self-deprecating quality, sardonic humour and darkness. Indeed a discernible darkness – even gothic – quality permeates a great deal of Australian music (Nick Cave, The Dirty Three, for example), cinema (films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock 1975, The Boys 1998, Lantana 2001, Suburban Mayhem 2006, Snowtown 2011), visual art (Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, Tracey Moffatt, the late Adam Cullen) and literature (Marcus Clarke, Barbara Baynton, Patrick White, Andrew McGahan). Speaking about Australia, Londonbased actor Noah Taylor, a close friend of the artist, whom Borland photographed for Australians, commented: It’s a young country battling to find itself. I think essentially it’s got a dark melancholy nature, which is a source of material, if not inspiration, for a lot of Australian artists.4

Borland’s capacity to articulate this underlying discordant tone or strangeness was noted by

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British journalist and novelist, Will Self, who wrote of Borland’s Bunny series: I remember seeing her photographs for the first time, and thinking that with their saturated colours and supernova exposures, they seemed of a piece with Jane Campion’s first feature, Sweetie 1989; and that here was another antipodean visual artist who took a world rendered banal by familiarity, then made it strange once more.5

Identifying an antipodean aesthetic brings to mind another Australian expatriate, the late Leigh Bowery, whom Borland met and photographed in the 1980s. The legendary performance artist, fashion designer, artist and musician moved from Australia to London in 1980, reinventing himself via his artwork, which was, essentially, his life.

Celebrated for his extreme fashion and costuming that melded high camp with fetishism, Bowery created a persona that has endured after his death. His work comes to mind in the red-spot works of Bunny, although Borland cites the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama as her influence: such is the nature of contemporary culture.

Aside from a love of costumes, what the two expatriates share with an artist such as Barry Humphries is a willingness to eschew traditional constructions of beauty, and explore ugliness. To understand something of Borland’s larger project, we might turn to Barry Humphries wonderfully tongue-in-cheek book entitled Treasury of Australian Kitsch. First published in 1980, Humphries’s satire explores Australia’s cultural identity across art, fashion and architecture.

Of course, Humphries’s humour relies on his reader being complicit in his observations. His sardonic exposé of Australian ‘culture’ is less mean-spirited, perhaps, than Robin Boyd’s book The Australian Ugliness 1960, with its earnest and learned criticism; its title, however, could comfortably be applied to any of Borland’s bodies of work, without irony. Borland is, above all else, not afraid of ugliness or otherness. Rather,

she deliberately highlights the cringe-worthy awkwardness of her subjects. For Borland, the inherent ‘beauty’ of her subjects lies in their apparent abnormality or threat to normalcy.

Simultaneously, a curious childlike innocence is evident, even when the artist explores sexual tropes. Borland’s own position, however, could only be described as ambivalent: she takes no moral position, adopts no superior tone. She does poke fun at sexual innuendo and thwarts expectations of beauty. If anything, her art might lie in outsider territory. It is rogue, unpredictable and anything but polite – a challenge to taste or good manners. Her images can be vulgar, but also very funny: very Australian.

The Babies The Babies began in 1994 when Borland was commissioned by The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom to document infantilism; through the project Borland developed a deep interest in this subject. Over some five years, she photographed a number of practicing infantilists – adults who choose to dress as babies for sexual pleasure – in France, America, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Writing about The Babies, the late Susan Sontag observed that Borland gives us all the details and accoutrements before she delivers what Sontag calls the ‘punch line’. The critic used the term ‘scrutinize’ to describe Borland’s gaze. Her images are honest – they are not pretty or airbrushed.

While The Babies emerged out of Borland’s documentary photography, the series is closely aligned in spirit to her fine art practice, and was the genesis of work to come: Bunny, Smudge and Pupa. An interest in costume emerged – clothing as armour, transforming and transformative.

Borland appeared confident to experiment with obfuscating and obscuring her subject, reducing it to abstract elements.

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Certainly the influence of the late Diane Arbus is apparent in The Babies. Like Arbus, Borland unconventionally frames her subjects and extends the traditional definitions of portraiture. Arbus was celebrated and criticised for her conspicuous choice of society’s outsiders: identical twins, transvestites, disabled people, giants and dwarves, and yet to label her ‘the photographer of freaks’ is to diminish her prolific output. Her empathy for her subjects exceeded a spurious interest, just as Borland’s interest in difference is less an exercise in point and stare, and more an attraction to a particular non-traditional notion of beauty. But, as Sontag wrote in her introductory essay to The Babies, It’s a long time that the camera has been bringing us news about zanies and pariahs, their miseries and their quirks. Showing the banality of the non-normal.

Making voyeurs out of us all. But this is particularly gifted, authoritative, intelligent work. Borland’s pictures seem very knowing, compassionate; and too close, too familiar, to suggest mere curiosity. There is nothing of the ingenuous stare of a Diane Arbus picture. (I don’t doubt that Arbus would have felt invited by these subjects, but surely she would have photographed them very differently.)6

Borland herself was most struck by the generosity of those who allowed themselves to be photographed and, therefore, exposed. She wrote, ‘In the five years of doing this project the most common story I heard was that the Babies felt unloved as children.’7 Borland draws respectful attention to these fringe dwellers whose personal desires mark them as outsiders, unable to share an important aspect of themselves publicly. Perhaps, like so many of us, they cannot face the sight of themselves – sick of their own appearance, they prefer themselves in this guise, as babies. How can we pass judgement on these individuals? Who does not, on some deep, subconscious level, wish to be picked up again and held, nurtured as a baby?

Writer Peter Conrad has observed, ‘Polly has a way of seeking out fragility, and sympathising

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with it.’8The Babies provides evidence of her empathetic, yet non-sentimental, gaze. Rather than inviting sympathy, Borland empowers her subjects by seeing them, and making us see them too.

I think that anyone who is working creatively is a bit like litmus paper … I soak up a lot of stuff. I am hyper-sensitive and along the way I lead quite a conventional life. Maybe I am not acting out that stuff because it’s in my work. It comes from existential angst. I think life’s difficult.9

Bunny Conceptually, Borland’s Bunny series echoes The Babies. A similar strategy of scrutiny is employed in her studies of the exceptionally tall model Gwendoline Christie. Borland was drawn to Christie having observed her for some time around Brighton before asking her to be the subject of Bunny. Borland describes the genesis of Bunny: This girl was a total stranger, who I’d seen walking around Brighton for a while in 2003. She was extremely tall and captivating in her style, like a 1950s starlet. One day, it just came to me that I should be taking photos of her. So I found out that she was called Gwen and where she worked, and marched in there and gave her my phone number.

Then she rang me and said she’d like to be involved, so we started taking the photographs.

At first it was going to be a Bunny Yeager-style pinup shot. But it evolved into me dressing her up in weird costumes to do with femininity and female representation. She was very theatrical in the way she presented herself, and it just seemed to naturally develop. As this was going on, Gwen and I formed a deep friendship as well. In her bedroom, I got her dressed in ballet tights, and then drew the face. The eyes are lipstick, and the mouth is eyeliner; I think we used socks to fill the ears out. I wanted it to look very homemade. I don’t know where the idea of putting the tights on her arms and head came from.

As we were shooting, she was doing different positions and different poses, and then all of a sudden she leaned over just like that. We’d been taking photos at this point for six months, and this was the launch of the real work. The image has a snapshot feel to it, which I love. A lot of my work is very controlled, but this was just a moment. It also evokes a lot of different things. It’s quite sinister, quite gritty, and the ears almost look like they could be extra legs, so it’s not easily digestible. I think it makes you question things. That is what I want from a photograph.10

At times Borland’s photographs have a random quality – as though the subject, in this case Christie, was not quite ready. The effect is to transform these playful, largely innocuous photographs into more powerful images of female sexuality. While the series makes reference to the idea of Playboy Bunny centerfolds, we see none of the beautification evident in that style of shoot, no Vaseline on the lens or airbrushing. In her beautiful imperfection, Christie conjures the early days of centrefolds, before the hyper-pneumatic models that define the genre now. Bunny sits somewhere between two very British, phenomena: the PageThree girl (with enormous bare breasts), and a Reader’s Wife (homespun, average porn stars).

In the resulting images, Borland presents Christie as a twisted centrefold – exposed and displayed via a child’s dress-up box. Yet, importantly, Christie is not passive in presenting her sexuality, almost confronting the viewer, flaunting her sexuality. At times she is disguised, wearing a horse-head mask. Sometime she appears almost prepubescent and ungainly, at other times, predatory. She and Borland are performer and director, and the resultant photographs document a performance in which Christie’s body is made extreme, both beautiful and ugly; her attenuated limbs are exaggerated with stockings, her features amplified with excessively applied makeup.

Borland appears to revel in the grandeur of her subject’s proportions, exploring Christie’s body almost as though it were a landscape, folding her subject in on herself as though to abstract her

sexuality. We see a bruise through the gauzy red tights, and are confronted with veins and wrinkles.

Interestingly, given her focus on childhood, Borland has collaborated on two books with popular English children’s author Lauren Child, illustrating Child’s reworking of the fairytales The princess and the pea 2006, and Goldilocks and the three bears 2009. The latter involved an enchanting miniature world created by theatre designer Emily Jenkins, and featured the work of Melbournebased artist Tony Clark (a personal friend of the artist) in the form of miniature landscape paintings on the walls of the three bears’ home.

While illustrating a children’s book may seem at odds with Borland’s larger body of work, the artist’s deep attraction to the darker side of life is well matched to the tale of Goldilocks with its slightly sinister overtones, a twisted metaphor for the perils of taking that which doesn’t belong to you. Goldilocks is, after all, an almost coquettish minx, the author of her own misfortune, a mix of innocence and petulance. This foray into children’s fiction highlights a fascination with the uneasy space between childlike innocence and adult awareness that characterises so much of Borland’s work, from The Babies with its obvious references to childhood innocence as celebrated and fetishised by adults, through to Bunny and Smudge.

Smudge Musician, actor and author Nick Cave has collaborated frequently with Borland since the two met in Melbourne in 1978 and, though notoriously uncomfortable being photographed, Cave has appeared many times as a subject for Borland as himself, and in costume. In 2010, he worked with Borland on Smudge. In the Foreword for the publication on the series, Cave wrote about his discomfort being the subject:

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My friend Polly Borland rang me one morning. She wanted me to model for some photographs. Now there are two types of people in this world: those who like having their picture taken and those who don’t. I exist squarely in the latter … So it was that I went around to her house in Brighton. We played dress ups. Polly squeezed me into body stockings, rubber bathing caps, crotch-accentuating leotards; she shoved ping pong balls down the front of a lycra tankini, attached cow udders to my face, rouged my nipples, pulled shredded pantyhose over my head; wigs were put on backward – electric blue ones, blonde ones, horrid ones made of rusted steel wool; she glued phallic noses to my forehead, frightwigged me, squeezed me into glam rock boob tubes.

“Do I look all right?” I asked through a nylon gag.

“You look beautiful”, she replied as she emptied me out, reduced me, objectified me, transposed her crazed and melancholy imaginings onto the little that was left of me. Then with the snap of her camera, Polly ushered me into the community of sad, eroticized creatures that populate most of her work.11

Often reminiscent of the theatre, Borland’s costumes reflect her interest in circuses and beautiful clothing, that is to say, a child’s appreciation of ‘beautiful clothing’: all staticproducing cheap materials, high shine, and tacky sequins. Borland relishes materials such as polyester, stocking, icky-sticky fabrics that speak of scratchiness and sweat, and make a sound when worn. This love of costuming also speaks to childhood games of dressing up, playing with clothes that are too large or too small, ill fitting and age inappropriate. Her costume creations are fantastically DIY clumsy, cobbled together. When she does use props, she frequently thwarts their intended form, using them back to front, or not as they were intended, often to hilarious effect.

There is an element of ‘Everything I want to be when I grow up’ (Borland’s choice of exhibition title) in almost everything she makes, as though she were recalling her own youth, living it again vicariously through her subjects, though without sentimentality.

In Smudge, Cave observed, ‘…her pictures are never voyeuristic, never observational and never merely shocking. Rather Polly seems to me to be shooting into a distorted mirror and simply bringing back heartbreaking refracted images of herself.’12 This concept, that the subjects act as surrogates for the artist herself, provides a useful insight. Here, then, in Smudge is Polly (albeit via Nick Cave) with a green wig and horns, here she is with a prosthetic washboard stomach, and here she is as a Lurex monster. To extend the mirror analogy, it is as though Borland was looking into a fun-fair mirror, seeing her reflection distorted and contorted.

Cave writes, ‘I am struck by Polly’s deep love for her subjects and the dignity that exists in their dysmorphia.’13 This notion of dysmorphia – an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which the sufferer believes their body to be imperfect – is symptomatic of contemporary culture’s obsession with the body beautiful. Borland’s photographic practice shines a harsh light on the gritty truth of the human form with its lumps and bumps, bulges and ingrown hairs playing up the tension between the private and the public. That is to say, Borland turns us all into voyeurs, with a bawdy humour and wry eye, making us look at that which we may not actually want to see.

Borland’s subjects in Smudge are awkward, plump, defeated, at the mercy of their costumes.

They are, too, curiously asexual; all ‘untitled’, their gender in flux and largely irrelevant, they are pending assignment and identification. They might be women or men wearing prosthetic breasts, fake abdominal muscles or soft phallic protrusions.

Borland stuffs one stocking suit with so many balls that the figure beneath appears to be the victim of some heinous disease. Another body wearing a prosthetic chest complete with rippling ‘abs’ reminded the artist of an Australian lifesaver, and is a witty take on the body beautiful, the bronzed Aussie. Lush colour resonates throughout Smudge in bright blobs of orange and blue, the shock of

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a rainbow coloured wig, a clown’s red nose. The total effect is a heady mix of punk meets circus freak meets kitsch via a whimsical examination of the abject in contemporary culture. It is all too much and never enough. It is ebullient and rude, at the same time as it is an exercise in colour and formal properties.

Deviating briefly from her straight photographic practice, Borland worked with male prison inmates as part of Britain’s Fine Cell Work initiative to produce tapestry versions of five photographs from Smudge. Both the Smudge photographs and tapestries include the figure of the clown. Clowns are commonly cited as a source of irrational fear, and are the subject of a phobia (coulrophobia), due to their costume concealing the wearer. With their painted faces, clowns suggest a forced jollity that hides the real ‘tears of a clown’, as the song goes. They are simultaneously associated with prat falls, children’s birthday parties and, unfortunately, serial killers – the infamous murderer James Gacy used to don a clown’s costume to lure his child victims. Even Borland’s incarnation of Father Christmas manages to blend innocence with creepiness. In another image, a pig costume hangs flaccidly: the head lolls as though severed from the body, and the pink of the faux fur is grubby. That the tapestries were made by ‘criminals’ adds a curious frisson to the work, and another layer of meaning. The devil does make work for idle hands. Here Borland’s work conjures a play between the malevolent and the ridiculous.

Cave’s observation about Borland’s images not being merely shocking is important. They are, if anything, low-tech shocking, low-rent theatrical.

Indeed, Borland’s photographic practice is decidedly ‘old school’. She shoots on film and takes an enormous number of frames to arrive at the desired final shot, and never uses Photoshop.

As a result, an element of risk exists in Borland’s process – waiting for the test sheets to arrive, the surprise of the result, and the subtle to and fro of selecting images. What makes a good picture?

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What makes a bad picture? Arguably, Borland’s work relies more for its visual power on the answer to the latter question. Borland’s test sheets reveal small differences between frames that have greater impact when printed large. Instead of looking for the perfect image, Borland seeks the imperfections, the flaws. This off-kilter approach to looking lends the work its edgy awkwardness. In presenting the final selection, Borland invites the viewer to share her askew vision.

Pupa Borland’s most recent body of work, Pupa 2012, emerged after she relocated to Hollywood, which inspired the exploration of narcissism through a series of images of contorted forms reflected in mirrors. They might be real bodies or stuffed mannequins – bound taut, their ‘skin’ bulges and spills out and cannot be contained, the tortured swollen flesh reminiscent of S&M. In Borland’s hall of mirrors, to return to that side-show analogy briefly, there are echoes of Hans Bellmer’s unpleasant dolls (the Latin translation of ‘pupa’ is doll) and, again, of Cindy Sherman’s sex photographs of medical mannequins. Pupa seems the very evocation of the body made abject, grotesque in its malformation. The forms, for they scarcely resemble ‘bodies’ as we know them, are endlessly refracted and reflected, abstracted and distorted. In Pupa there resides a logical extension of the ideas in Smudge: the body pushed to its limits of taste and physical form, broken down into shapes made visceral. Something repulsive as well as seductive exists in the creepy stocking material with its beige ‘skin’ tone and staticinducing quality: nothing is so unlike skin as fleshtone stockings.

Pupa alludes to an insect’s chrysalis stage, suggestive of something growing and fattening, in the process before ‘becoming’. In the pupal stage, an insect will adopt a camouflage to protect it from predators. Like so many of Borland’s subjects, the forms in Pupa are full of the promise of what

they could become. Borland plays on Hollywood’s allure and promise of beauty to be had at any price, whether through cosmetic enhancement or digital manipulation. The body/bodies in Pupa are halfway between being wrong and beautiful, fecund in their reflected repetition. Again, the subject is suppressed, identity is disguised and, in fact, irrelevant. He/she/it is pushed and pulled to an extreme.

As with Bunny and Smudge, Pupa extends Borland’s artistic project of constantly exploding conventional constructions of beauty and ugliness.

More specifically, Borland looks for, and finds, beauty within that which may typically be deemed ugly by virtue of its failure to comply to some commonly held notion of beauty.

In her essay for The Babies, Susan Sontag wrote: What are the frontiers of attractiveness – and of unattractiveness? Images produced by cameras have more to tell us, in unpacking this question, than any other resource. Maybe we are no longer capable of thinking about the attractiveness of bodies and faces except in the ways we’ve learned through the camera’s presumptuous seeing. Enlarging, miniaturizing – the camera judges, the camera reveals.14

1. Polly Borland, The Independent, 12 July 2008.

2.

Polly Borland, interview with the author, 7 March 2012.

3. Ibid.

4. Noah Taylor, Australians (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2000), 22.

5.

Will Self, ‘Sheer Polly’, The Independent,

12 July 2008.

6.

Susan Sontag, ‘Foreword’, in The Babies

(New York: powerHouse Books, 2001), 3.

7.

Polly Borland, The Babies (New York:

powerHouse Books, 2001), 98.

8.

Peter Conrad, in Polly Borland: Australians

(London: National Portrait Gallery Publications,

2000), 7.

9.

Polly Borland, interview with Rob Sharp,

The Independent, 17 March 2011.

10.

Polly Borland in Leo Benedictus,

‘Polly Borland’s best shot’, The Guardian,

15 May 2008. Bunny Yeager was a 1950s photographer who began her career as a pin-up girl. She is best known for her photographs of famous pin-up model Betty Page.

11.

Nick Cave, Smudge (Barcelona/New York:

Actar, 2010), 1.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14.

Susan Sontag, ‘Foreword’, in The Babies

(New York: powerHouse Books, 2001), 4.

15.

Nick Cave, Australians (London: National

Portrait Gallery Publications, 2000), 2.

Borland knows only too well the power of the photographic gaze. Drawn to the weird and wonderful, Borland’s left-of-centre approach transforms the ordinary, even banal, into the extraordinary via costumes and props, creates something equal parts monstrous and exquisite.

Maybe Polly Borland’s unique ability lies in confusing beauty with ugliness, so that we are left with a hybrid of the two – the imaginings of an artist for whom the real world is not quite strange enough.

Alison Kubler

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“I’m not doing it for shock. If anything I don’t like it when

people can’t look at my work because it’s to be looked at, I’m to be looked at. But at the same time I make work the way I like and I don’t want to look at work that is easy,

that’s for me really what the bottom line is. It’s not only

what I’m trying, the ideas and the emotions that I’m trying to convey, it’s also that I don’t want it to be easy.”

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Polly Borland interviewed by Ignacio Andreu Remixed by Jonathan Pavesi

Ignacio: I’m interested in knowing about your preteenage years, especially the period before you acknowledged popular culture?

Polly: Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately because I’ve realised that from a very young age I was assessing everything on a visual level.

I remember being captivated by the floral blinds in our house because they created patterns that looked like those tests, the ink-blots...

Ignacio: The Rorschach test, I believe.

Polly: Yes, and you’re supposed to read into what you see in them. I was doing that with everything.

I was fascinated, almost obsessive and completely turned on by my visual environment, particularly things on surfaces, the print on our curtains, sparkly clothing, pictures, two-dimensional things.

Ignacio: When you’re a child you are not able to rationalise those tendencies. As an adult are you able to identify the fixation?

Polly: At the time, I think it was about getting into a place of imagination and escape for me.

It was also this constant pursuit of perfection. I have a memory of this doll. My mother was in the hospital having yet another baby and my father would go and visit her and for some reason we weren’t allowed, I don’t know why, and he would bring home toys for us. He had brought me home a really cheap doll, the kind with eyelashes in it, except the eyelashes kept falling out because this doll was manufactured in a third-world country.

So everyday when he went to visit my mother, I would make him bring me a new one in the hope that the eyelashes would stay intact and lodged in the plastic. I was always disgruntled at things that were in some way messed up.

Ignacio: Do you think it drove you to use your imagination in quite an intense way?

Polly: Obviously, I wasn’t very content as a child.

I didn’t ever really feel particularly safe, nor was I comfortable with my environment or myself. I saw people around me decaying; I saw that this is what happens, that everything, my dolls, people, buildings that everything is in a state of decay.

There was this constant state of trying not to absorb the world around me, so I began to assess it in a visual almost analytical way. It became about my interpretation of life, of imagery, the

world around me, and my ability to give it all some kind of order as a coping mechanism.

Ignacio: Would you talk a little bit about your teenage, post-teenage years?

Polly: Those years were an extremely, creative, dynamic, and fertile time. I was at art school. I was always very interested in art history in secondary school and in fifth and sixth [form] you always had to have art history coupled with a practical art subject. The thing was I couldn’t draw, so my art teacher said I’ll set up a dark room and you can try taking photos and that’s how it all really happened.

The minute I started taking photos I had found a way that I could interpret the world on a visual level but also control it.

Ignacio: At that time some of the cultural offerings that came out of Australia were very extreme and defiant. Where did the anger come from? Was there a political stance, something that not only drove you but the sensibility of the times?

Polly: I think that in Australia there wasn’t that much to be angry about. There was an optimism at that time: ‘the sky’s the limit’. In those days everyone looked to Europe for their influences.

Any influence on an artistic or creative level didn’t come from within our culture, but what the Australian environment gave us was an isolation.

That’s where the anarchistic aspect came in.

There were a lot of drugs being consumed and that really fed into it, as well as a deep-seated irreverence towards authority amongst my generation. We made it up, pieced it together, turned it into something different. In the end you get this cocktail of creativity and expression that becomes its own thing because it’s not based on any thing.

Ignacio: What was your view of human nature in those years in particular when you picked up photography and started working?

Polly: I think we were all just behaving on a very sensory level. I don’t think there was an organised ‘view’. I don’t think any of us really had one per se. A lot of it was just soaking up as many influences from the outside world as we could.

There weren’t computers, we didn’t have access the way we do now. We had to work for it. You had to discover things. We influenced each other,

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it was very minute-by-minute, very sensory. I remember that same feeling of excitement I had as a child from what was going on around me. That’s when I discovered Larry Clark in a tiny gallery in Melbourne on Punt Road which is still there, called The Photographer’s Gallery. Inside there were these shitty little prints stuck to the wall, unframed with scratch marks all over them because they had been printed from scratched negatives. None of them had been cleaned up. They were photos of people hitting up, pregnant women, guns, and sex. I thought ‘My God, here is someone that has documented his own life and put it on a gallery wall.’ I found it quite shocking even though that was the reality I was living with. By then life had taken on a more sinister tone. I had become gripped by alcohol while everyone around me was sticking needles in their arms. What ended up happening was the drugs took hold and that became quite a dark place in itself because people were dying, people were getting into all sorts of really terrible situations, and so I think my view on human nature came from was what I was surrounded by.

Ignacio: You mentioned being shocked the first time you saw Larry Clark’s work. I recall I told you a story of someone who came to my house and opened your first book The Babies and left. I knew there was a direct relationship, that the reason this person got up and left was because he perhaps wasn’t able to digest or confront the material, or perhaps he thought, that because I had that book, it meant I had a pair of diapers in the bathroom.

Polly: I had realised that the only work I wanted to do was work that transported me on some level.

When I first heard about the adult babies, I thought it was comical. Then when I saw it, my feeling was this is kind of sad, but it also had all these other elements, there were layers to it. Visually it was unbelievable. There were giant babies crawling around the room so it had a pantomime quality, there was psychological pathos as well as seediness. I’ve never said this, not publicly, but on some level there was identification because I thought, I’d still like to be a baby. I found it thrilling.

I found the illicit and secretive aspect of it very much like the Larry Clark work. So for me, it had all the elements that I appreciate when I look at works of art that I love. I don’t want to look at just pretty pictures, I’m not interested. Pretty can be good but it’s got to have other elements.

Ignacio: Why? Polly: Because when I look at paintings or photographs on a wall I want them to be able to

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do more than one thing, be something more than just pretty. For me, beauty is easy. Don’t get me wrong, I love beauty, I love looking at beautiful looking people. That being said, I think that we see it so often we’re saturated by it. That is what is so marvellous and fantastic about the world and life.

Go look at a sunset, look at the sea, the world can be breathtakingly beautiful to look at. I’m just more interested in conveying a truth, and that the truth is underneath every surface there’s something that’s not as simple or as straight forward as just beautiful.

Ignacio: Which is a direct reference to The Babies.

Polly: Yes, because if you look at those photos they’re very beautifully lit, all of what they’re wearing is beautiful to look at. But beneath it all there are these sort of sad lonely men, which in itself is sort of beautiful. Usually the environments are a bit tawdry, the carpet might be a bit grubby, and we’re all, as I said at the beginning, we’re all in a state of decay. Even the sunset doesn’t last.

That’s the beauty of it, nothing lasts in nature.

Nature is...

Ignacio: Merciless...

Polly: Exactly. We’re in a state of recycle, we’re being recycled every minute of the day and that is part of life, the tragedy of it and the beauty. That’s my aversion to something that’s only aesthetically beautiful, why I don’t want to look at just pretty pictures. I think, yeah fine if it’s a pretty picture but what’s going on underneath it? My new work is probably much more pretty or beautiful than anything else I’ve ever done, but it’s still going to pack a punch. I mean, I couldn’t do it any other way.

Ignacio: Do you recognise in your work a tendency to air the private, to undress the secluded? A necessity to look behind closed doors, exposing the reserved and its mysteries?

I see this in The Babies, Bunny, Smudge and your latest work, which seems to do that at many levels?

Polly: Yes, that’s a very good interpretation of it, I hadn’t thought about that but that resonates with me, it makes a lot of sense.

Ignacio: What are your thoughts regarding sex and its importance?

Polly: It’s controlling us; we’re not controlling it.

Ignacio: So could we say that your work portrays what is uncontrollable? What happens behind

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closed doors, meaning: you see this well dressed executive on the street, he appears to be a well educated proper gentleman, and then he goes into his house, his private realm, and he likes to get fucked in the arse with a baseball bat, something you would never presume from his public presence. You seem to bring those guarded impulses into your work, so the whole world can see them.

Polly: (Laughs) Yes. Ignacio: Do you think there is a direct reference between your last work and the fact that you have moved from London to Los Angeles?

Polly: I definitely think this work is very LA influenced. I would generalise and say with most artists that there’s a heightened sensitivity to the environment or one’s own environment, and you interpret that environment as I said I was doing from a very early age. Then there is also what’s going on for me on the inside, so it’s my own. I think this work is very much about LA but it’s also very much about where I’m at at the moment, who I am, what I’m going through.

Ignacio: What do you think about the contemporary art world, and what’s your relationship to it. How do you position yourself?

Polly: Well I don’t really position myself because I feel like I’m still a newcomer so I try not to analyse it. I don’t look at a lot of stuff, because when I do, I tend to get disappointed by what I’m looking at. I feel that most of it’s not very interesting, to tell you the truth. There is some work that I really like but not a lot, which I suppose is probably normal for most, but I think there’s a lot of crap being made out there, it just seems cynical and jaded to me.

Ignacio: It is funny that you call yourself a newcomer. You have by now acquired an extensive body of work. I understand you won’t recognise your commercial work as artistic, but some of us do. You’ve done some really interesting commercial work with a distinguishable signature; for example, some of your LP covers are great pieces.

Polly: I recognise it, I have. Admittedly my influences were people like Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, and really I modelled myself on that school of artist; they do portraits, they do magazine work, they do a bit of everything.

They’re so distinctive in their vision that you know each informs the other, each assignment or each area of photography becomes as valuable on an artistic level as each other. But for me, the portrait

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work came easily and so creatively, it began to feel restricting. I had to leave it behind. I just felt that I wasn’t creatively engaged or developing. I didn’t go to art school to be taught how to be an artist, I’ve made it up as I’ve gone along, and it’s because my role models were people like Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Larry Clark, and Weegee.

I would argue that all their commercial work transcends the constraints of why it was produced, they’re working on a different level. Now whether I’m doing that or not, I don’t know. I don’t know if I have achieved that. I’m obviously not nearly as well known as Richard Avedon or Larry Clark.

I only do what I do now because I enjoy doing it, there is no other reason. Once upon a time there was a certain amount of ambition involved, whereas now, it’s because it’s the thing that keeps me vaguely sane. I love it and I always loved it, but sometimes that got a bit perverted by the desire for recognition. I no longer have that. It’s the least important thing to me now, almost. It’s the work itself that’s important, and the people that I love appreciating it.

Ignacio: “It keeps me vaguely insane”, that goes in for sure, that’s a good one. One thing that I...

Polly: Insane, did I say, or vaguely sane?

Ignacio: Vaguely sane, sorry. One of the things that I also find fascinating is that people like Diane Arbus or Weegee actually took pictures of what we don’t normally want to see, feel repulsed by, or try to ignore on a more physical, tangible level: death, abnormality, etc. The difference here is that you seem to portray, again, the “deviancy” in all of us, but there’s an evolution from your last work, from Smudge to Pupa. I see a kind of theme, which not only relates to LA, but to sex and pornography in more a direct fashion.

Polly: I do think it’s all interconnected and, in a way, Pupa is definitely a follow up to Smudge. It wasn’t intentional, a lot of it was circumstantial. I didn’t really know anyone in LA so I decided early on that the elements I wanted to use were some mirrors and I would make my own dolls. I live in a house with a lot of mirrors so I didn’t have to find a studio and I could make my own dolls. They would be substitute people and what followed on from there was the work. The way I’ve made the dolls is very Smudge-esque, all stocking and stuffing.

Then Liberty Ross came into my life. She wanted to collaborate with me on something for her, a film, and I said ‘well I’d like to take photos of you for my work.’ I basically did two days with her and didn’t push it as far as I would have liked to. She had gone away on holiday for three weeks and I texted

her and said, ‘I’m going to need to do one more day, I need to push it further’, and that’s when I came up with the really key bits.I mean I came up with some great stuff the first time, but that last day was mind blowing, well, mind blowing for me anyway.

Ignacio: What would you say to the people that argue that your work is a straight-up provocation?

Polly: I’d say, that’s their bad luck. For me personally, when I look at it, it works on different levels, particularly the new works. It’s very sensual, sexual yet sculptural. I find it in the tradition of women artists that have come before me, so if people think it’s shallow then it’s obviously not their kind of work.

Ignacio: But I’m interested in more than if they think it’s shallow or not. The fact that they might argue that pushing things so much at the end just becomes an effective tool, meaning if I push it to the limit I’m going to get this response, so the more I push it, the more I’m going to get that response, and if that’s the only motif behind it, to push things, then what’s behind?

Polly: Behind is all the things we talked about: my life, the way I feel. People can be either interested in that or not, but it’s what I’m interested in. I don’t think I’m that special or different that other people aren’t going to be able to relate to how I’m feeling or how I’m viewing the world. It’s art by osmosis and I think that that’s the most successful art.

I personally might not be the most successful artist but I’ve always felt the most successful art manages to articulate and crystallize the complexities, ironies and the contradictions of the time that we live in without ever consciously trying to do so.

Ignacio: Is there a need for a reaction that’s so strong and disturbing. Would you agree there’s a relationship there? A punk rock ethos so to speak?

buildings, particularly houses for people, but also he was this mishmash of a person. You talked about the private and the public. Everyone adored my father, he was handsome, he was funny, he was charismatic, he was incredibly talented, but behind closed doors he was angry, tired, emotionally removed and in a lot of instances, absent. In private we had to watch my mother who was the living dead because she was comatose on prescription drugs and alcohol. We bore witness to that I now believe, as you said, most people get up to all sorts of things behind closed doors but they’re not prepared to air their dirty laundry in public. For me it’s about shedding light on the shadowy areas, the grey areas, and synthesising it into a sense that you know the world is all these things; it’s not all light and it’s not all dark, but a combination of the two. It’s also a way for me to understand myself. It helps exorcise whatever demons I may have that are still lurking around.

Actually, and I’m looking back, even though I say it was all unconscious, in many ways I’m working on a fairly self-aware level, whereas I know other artists that don’t really analyse themselves at all, and they just produce the work. And again, arguably, maybe they’re more creative or more talented or more successful artists. I’m not doing it for shock. If anything I don’t like it when people can’t look at my work because it’s to be looked at, I’m to be looked at. But at the same time I make work the way I like and I don’t want to look at work that is easy, that’s for me really what the bottom line is. It’s not only what I’m trying, the ideas and the emotions that I’m trying to convey, it’s also that I don’t want it to be easy. I think that you can have beautiful and ugly existing in the same train because I think that’s...

Ignacio: Life.

Polly: Yeah, I would say that, but it’s not done for a reaction. If anything I’m hypersensitive to the fact I’m very middle-class in the sense that I’m acutely aware that the work is quite shocking and hard to look at, so if anything, there’s part of me that’s a bit embarrassed by that. Again, that doesn’t stop me; I refuse to censor myself in areas that I don’t think should be censored. I am prepared to walk ‘where angels fear to tread’ because that is the life of an artist, that’s my life. Because, yeah, punk informed me but I also came from a family where my father was so out there with what he did. He was very original and very inventive while having influence.

He was very ahead of his time in how he designed

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The Babies

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“I usually start with an idea, smudge, or subject matter,

like adult babies or Gwen in Bunny, and explore the ideas and subject matter on an aesthetic level and emotional level.

Each shot is a part of a greater body of work and each

session helps gather more images and helps clarify along the way ideas and aesthetic approaches and choices.�

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Bunny

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“Diane Arbus was very influential as was Larry Clark when I first started taking photos. Both photographers work served as inspiration and revelation to me. These two

artists gave me the bravery to continue to take risks in my own practice. I love Paul Klee and some of Picasso,

Andy Warhol and some of Cindy Sherman. Film makers have

been hugely influential - Pasolini and Bresson - and film in

general has been a source of inspiration to me personally.�

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Smudge

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“I think that anyone who is working creatively is a bit like

litmus paper … I soak up a lot of stuff. I am hyper-sensitive

and along the way I lead quite a conventional life. Maybe I am not acting out that stuff because it’s in my work. It comes from existential angst. I think life’s difficult.”

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List of works Portraits

Untitled (Nick Cave in a blue wig) 2010 type C photograph 210.0 x 160.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Daydreaming Projects, London. © Polly Borland Cate Blanchett 2000 type C photograph 101.5 x 80.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Her Majesty, The Queen, Elizabeth II (gold) 2001 type C photograph 210.0 x 160.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Her Majesty, The Queen, Elizabeth II (blue) 2001 type C photograph 93.0 x 74.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

p. 12

p. 16

p. 21

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The Babies Cathy, Julianne, Snuggles, and Roberta in Mummy Hazel's garden 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Julianne at home 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Mummy Hazel's sink, Kent, England 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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French Babies 2001 type C photograph 181.0 x 121.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Snuggles in a cradle at Mummy Hazel's 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Darren at home 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 182.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Julianne in bath at Mummy Hazel's 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 180.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Julianne at Mummy Hazel’s 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Cathy at Mummy Hazel's 2001 type C photograph 181.5 x 121.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Julianne in bath at home 2001 type C photograph 121.5 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Violet Blue at Tommy's house 2001 type C photograph 186.0 x 121.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Daisy wrestlin at lil' Kathi's party 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Julianne at home 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Snuggles in Mummy Hazel's garden 2001 type C photograph 121.0 x 181.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Bunny

Untitled I 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untited II 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled III 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 91.0 x 66.0 cm Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart. © Polly Borland

Untitled V 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled VI 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 91.0 x 66.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled VIII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled IX 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled X 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 35.0 x 27.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XI 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Private collection, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled XII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 35.0 x 27.0 cm Collection of Karen Woodbury and Chris Deutscher, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XIII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 91.0 x 66.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XVI 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XVII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 76.5 x 51.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2008. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XVIII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 27.0 x 35.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XIX 2004–2005 27.0 x 35.0 cm Fujicolour crystal archive print Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXI 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 27.0 x 35.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 35.0 x 27.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXIII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 27.0 x 35.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXIV 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 27.0 x 35.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXV 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Private collection, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXVII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXVIII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 26.0 x 34.6 cm Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXIX 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 27.0 x 35.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXXI 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXXII 2004–2005 Fujicolour crystal archive print 66.0 x 91.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Smudge

Untitled I 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled II 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Private collection, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled III 2010 chromogenic print 147.5 x 122.0 cm Private collection, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled IV 2010 chromogenic print 147.5 x 122.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled V 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled VI 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Collection of Paul Goldman, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled VII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled VIII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled IX 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled X 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XI 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XIII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XIV 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XV 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XVI 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Private collection, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled XVII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XVIII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XIX 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XX 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Private collection, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXI 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXIII 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXIV 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXV 2010 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Untitled XXVI 2010 p. 104 chromogenic print 76.0 x 65.0 cm Collection of Paul Goldman, Sydney. © Polly Borland

Untitled XXXII 2010 p. 105 chromogenic print 125.5 x 102.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Tapestries

Pig 2010 p. 106 photographic embroidery 61.0 x 50.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Clown 2010 p. 107 photographic embroidery 60.0 x 50.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Dog 2010 p. 108 photographic embroidery 60.0 x 51.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Father Christmas 2010 photographic embroidery 60.0 x 50.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

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Rabbit 2010 p. 110 photographic embroidery 60.0 x 51.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Snowman 2010 p. 111 photographic embroidery 60.0 x 50.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

Pupa Pupa II 2012 p. 113 archival pigment print 122.0 x 152.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Pupa IV 2012 p. 115 archival pigment print 152.5 x 122.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Pupa VI 2012 p. 117 archival pigment print 152.5 x 122.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Pupa XII 2012 p. 119 archival pigment print 152.5 x 122.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland Pupa XIII 2012 p. 121 archival pigment print 152.5 x 122.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne. © Polly Borland

bios Dr Peter Milne is a Brisbane based photomedia artist and educator who teaches Visual Communication at The University of Queensland (School of Journalism and Communication). He has been a fan of Polly Borland’s work for 34 years.

Polly Borland’s practice was established in the late 1980s by major portrait commissions and extraordinary reportage. Since 2000 the photographer’s art projects, exhibitions and publications have recorded documentary, collaborative and created subjects.

Alison Kubler is a freelance curator and writer.

She has a Double Major in Art History from The University of Queensland, Australia and a Masters in Post-war and Contemporary Art History from Manchester University, England. In 1995 she worked for the British Council on the 1995 Venice Biennale exhibition, General Release. In 2007 she worked as Arts Adviser to Senator The Hon George Brandis, SC, the former Federal Minister for the Arts and Sport. She has over 15 years experience working as a curator in museums and galleries in Australia. She is Associate Curator of The University of Queensland Art Museum, where her curatorial projects include the 2011 National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize, the more you ignore me, the closer I get, 2009 and Neo Goth: Back In Black, 2008. Other projects include Sebastian: Contemporary Realist Painting, Our Place in the Pacific: Recent work by Adam Cullen, Moving Cities at the Australian Embassy, Berlin in 2000, and Quiet Collision: Current Practice/Australian Style at Viafarini and CareOf contemporary art spaces in Milan, Italy. Alison is also co-director of mc/k art consulting, working on public art commissions, curatorial projects and private art collectives. She is currently co-authoring a book for Thames and Hudson UK on art and fashion.

She has three children, Phoebe 7, Olympia 4 and Leo 1.

Before focusing on art projects, Borland shot regularly for numerous UK and US publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Independent and Dazed and Confused.

In 1994 she won the prestigious John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and a selection of photographs from a previous body of work, The Babies was exhibited at the Southbank’s Meltdown Festival in 1999, curated that year by Nick Cave. In 2000 The National Portrait Galleries in London and Canberra exhibited Australians, a major commissioned solo exhibition. Powerhouse published her first book The Babies in 2001 with an essay by the late Susan Sontag. In that same year Borland was one of eight photographers selected to photograph Queen Elizabeth II for the Golden Jubilee.

In 2008 Damien Hirst’s Murderme Ltd Collection acquired an entire edition of the 50 photographs from BUNNY. The artist’s work has also been acquired by the collections of the National Portrait Galleries, London and Canberra, the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York.

Ignacio Andreu is the creative editor of C International Photo Magazine, London, UK & Madrid, Spain. He attended the North West School of Arts & Sciences, Seattle, Washington (USA) and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Media Critical Studies: Theory and Criticism, and his minor in New Media Communications (NMC) from the University of San Francisco, California (USA).

Ignacio now works in film.

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inside front and back cover: Untitled (Nick Cave in a blue wig) 2010 (details) type C photograph 210.0 x 160.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Daydreaming Projects, London. Š Polly Borland

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acknowledgements Exhibition curator Alison Kubler Author

Alison Kubler

Design

Brent Wilson and Gordon Craig

Editors

Michele Helmrich and Samantha Littley

Printed by

Fergies Print & Mail

The University of Queensland Art Museum personnel: Dr Campbell Gray, Director Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial) Nick Ashby, Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Gordon Craig, Exhibitions Coordinator Christian Flynn, Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Kath Kerswell, Collections Coordinator Samantha Littley, Curator Matt Malone, Project Officer Sebastian Moody, Special Projects Officer Beth Porter, Finance and Administration Coordinator Mariko Post, Visitor Services Officer Gillian Ridsdale, Curator Public Programs Brent Wilson, Technical Officer Exhibition Installers: Nick Ashby, Rob Corless, Christian Flynn, Liam O’Brien The University of Queensland Art Museum Board: Professor Alan Rix Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Chairperson) Judith Bell Member of Senate Clare Pullar Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Advancement)

UQ Art Museum would like to thank the following institutions and individuals, who have helped make this exhibition possible: Polly Borland, Alison Kubler, Chrissa Stilianos, Peter Milne, Ignacio Andreu, Martin Grant, Spectrum UK, The Icon LA USA The Gordon Darling Foundation Murray White and Mary Ellen, Murray White Room, Melbourne David Walsh, Nicole Durling, Jacqui Woolf and staff, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart Siobhan Andrews and staff, Daydreaming Projects, London Special thanks to all private lenders and copyright holders who have generously assisted the exhibition.

Polly Borland would like to thank: John Hillcoat, Louie Hillcoat, Fritha, Jody, Kate, Lucy, Emma and William Borland, Martin Grant, Tony Clark, Nick Cave, Peter Milne, Danny Monihan, Hugh Allen, Other Criteria, Polina Berlin, Paul Kasmin, Murray White, Mary Ellen, Jonathan Pavesi, Ignacio Andreu, Liberty Ross, Gwendoline Christie, Mark Holborn, Liz Jobey, Spectrum UK, Metro Imaging London UK, The Icon LA USA, Alison Kubler and all at UQ Art Museum.

Alison Kubler would like to thank: Polly Borland, Murray White Room, Martin Grant, the UQ Art Museum staff, Chrissa Stilianos for her curatorial assistance, Nick Mitzevich for giving it the initial green light, Alex Chomicz and Meg Carlsen for generously sharing their film, Lindsay Kubler for her support and babysitting, Michael Zavros for his encouragement and enthusiasm and especially Phoebe, Olympia and Leo for being patient with their working mum.

Professor Deborah Terry Vice-Chancellor Professor Joanne Tompkins Head, School of English, Media Studies and Art History Dr Campbell Gray (ex officio)

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The University of Queensland Art Museum The James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre The University of Queensland St Lucia Queensland 4072 Australia www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au

supported by

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