Sullivan+Strumpf

Viewing Room

Polly Borland
We Are Family

Naarm/Melbourne
04 Jul – 27 Jul 24

INTRODUCTION

Sullivan+Strumpf is thrilled to present We Are Family–a new exhibition by internationally celebrated artist Polly Borland. Borland's prevailing themes–surrealist composition, the abstracted body, gender fluidity–are alive in this new body of sculptures.

Continuing the distinctive and disruptive visual language that has defined Borland's nearly 4 decades as an artist, this new body of work sees the artist further solidifying her mastery of both the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space.

We Are Family: Jolly, Smiley, Birdie, Ellie, Ropey and Boxhead

Jolly 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 26.2 × 27.6 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Jolly artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Jolly artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

"For me, sculpture is another way of further abstracting the human form and the human identity."

POLLY BORLAND

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH POLLY BORLAND ON VISIONS: A PODCAST FROM SULLIVAN+STRUMPF

Birdie 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 21.3 × 19.6 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Birdie artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Birdie artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Birdie artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Smiley 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 25.3 × 16.6 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Smiley artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Jolly, Smiley and Birdie artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

"For me, [this work is] removing somebody's identity, but it's creating a new identity, one that's usually, in some way based, in humanity. Not necessarily humanness as we understand it, but in a pathos. These creatures or these people that aren't people–there's usually a lot of pathos in them."

POLLY BORLAND

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH POLLY BORLAND ON VISIONS: A PODCAST FROM SULLIVAN+STRUMPF

Elephant, Ropey and Boxhead artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Ropey artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Ropey 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 27 × 26.8 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Ropey artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Ropey artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

"[My work is] not always self-driven, conscious, calculated ideas. Opportunities might present themselves, or an idea might present itself, and then I run with that. But somehow, they're all interrelated. There is an inherent visual logic to what I do."

POLLY BORLAND

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH POLLY BORLAND ON VISIONS: A PODCAST FROM SULLIVAN+STRUMPF

Boxhead 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 20.2 × 12.3 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Boxhead artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Boxhead artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

Ellie 2024

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish
61 × 34.1 × 25.7 cm
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs

Elephant artwork documentation
Photography by Phillip Huynh

"[In the Morph series] I wanted to eradicate the detail, and it ended up subverted. I wanted much more of a cocoon-like, otherworldly, pre-conscious stage. But as I went along with that work, sexual organs became apparent. There were eyes in some of them, mouths, but more obscured in a sense, or more abstracted than [previous works] had been."

POLLY BORLAND

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH POLLY BORLAND ON VISIONS: A PODCAST FROM SULLIVAN+STRUMPF

Morph 1 2018

archival pigment print
200.5 × 162.5 cm (print size)
Edition of 6 plus 3 artist's proofs

Morph 16

archival pigment print
92 × 78.5 cm (print size)
Edition of 6 plus 3 artist's proofs

Morph 30 2018

archival pigment print
92 × 78.5 cm (print size)
Edition of 6 plus 3 artist's proofs

Morph 21 2018

archival pigment print
200.5 × 162.5 cm (print size)
Edition of 6 plus 3 artist's proofs

EXHIBITION ESSAY

Upon entry into Polly Borland’s We Are Family, I am met with an inescapable sense that I have been expected. An assembly of six amorphous and anomalous characters stand in anticipation. The family has gathered.

We Are Family demonstrates Borland’s enduring capacity for reinterpreting her own distinctive visual language, a language that has proven definitive in her near four decades as an artist. The sculptures in this exhibition, each one coming in at almost two feet high and finished in different shades of mattified paint, are born from the same instinct that permeates Borland’s earliest works and all forward momentum since.

Borland’s work has long held the body as a central concern. In Morph, 2018, a photographic series from which four key works have been included in We Are Family, Borland eradicates the detail of the human figure, introducing features of bulbous proportions through the use of stockings and cushion stuffings. In these images, the human within has gone beyond our recognition, distorted to such a degree that all signifiers of individuality are neutralised. "For me, [this work is] removing somebody's identity, but it's creating a new identity, one that's usually, in some way based, in humanity,” says Borland. “[It’s] not necessarily humanness as we understand it, but in a pathos. These creatures or these people that aren't people–there's usually a lot of pathos in them."

This technique–human encased in stocking and stuffed into abstraction–is a mainstay in Borland’s practice. In We Are Family, this process extends beyond the visual conclusion reached in previous works. Where Morph saw Borland’s art object rendered as photographs, the artist today is fixated on sculpture, in taking what was represented in the two-dimensional plane and making it alive in three-dimensional space. Through 3D scanning technology, Borland’s soft sculptural figures are translated to the aluminium-cast humanoids of this exhibition. Retained in this translation is the appearance of a material softness, an illusory perception quickly betrayed were you to touch the hard metal skin of these figures.

While decidedly contemporary in both their aesthetic result and thematic rationale, Borland’s sculptures bear comparison to those of surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst. A key figure of Dadaism, Ernst’s work eschews strict logic, or the aesthetic rationality dictated by modern capitalism. Rather, we are met with works that embrace the nonsensical, the absurd, the strange. In many of his sculptural works, Ernst rendered the body an oddity, while maintaining our ability to recognise it. This propensity for whimsy does not evade rigour; Ernst’s sculptural works are the product of observation, study, and an aptitude for expanding the realm of possibility through rejecting that which is previously assumed about its limits. Borland’s sculptures, too, agitate the edges of reality. Near comedic anatomical abnormalities converge with an innate and impregnable humanness definitive of Borland’s practice.

This text marks my third time writing about Borland’s work. To that end, I have interviewed her several times and spent many hours tracing the curves of her career, its pivots and its progressions. Her work feels as close to me now as my own skin. I feel the material motif of Borland’s stockings as if it were against my own cheek. To look at sculpture, to experience an artwork spatially as the medium demands, is to be made aware of your own body. The sensation that I exist in a body is one I feel with urgency when experiencing the sculptures in We Are Family. There is a proximity, an intimacy, that I can’t circumnavigate. I am in their confidence, and they in mine. The family is strong.

CLAIRE SUMMERS

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Indigenous People of this land, the traditional custodians on whose Country we work, live and learn. We pay respect to Elders, past and present, and recognise their continued connection to culture, land, waters and community.

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