Polly Borland

Visions: A Sullivan+Strumpf Podcast

Polly Borland is one of Australia’s most internationally recognisable contemporary artists. Famed for her early editorial work and portraiture, the artist today has shifted her focus decidedly to sculpture.
Claire Summers spoke with Polly about her new exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf, about the distinctive and disruptive visual language that has defined her practice throughout her 4 decades as an artist and about her transition from photography to working in three-dimensional space.
Encountering Borland’s work is to be met first with a kind of obscurity. It is not her intention or desire that the work can or should be immediately understood. Borland’s work is intentionally unsettling, at least initially. In her sculptural works, turgid, morphed, misshapen, almost alien forms stand or slump before us. The urge to flinch is as strong as the one to prod. Yet beneath the skin of her creatures, both in her imagery and sculpture, stirs something deeply human. The artist invites us to look further, to ask questions not only of the work but of ourselves, of the self we see reflected to us. It is this lingering hint of the human that draws us closer, and closer still.