Polly Morgan on Taxidermy, Family & Letting Things Go

0:00I never wanted what other people wanted. I always wanted kind of the opposite, if anything, almost maybe on purpose. Everyone used to say, how can you cut it open? And I always used to think, well, why wouldn't you want to skin an animal? Why wouldn't you want to see what was underneath the skin? Everyone in our lives has been through this building. And we've rented out for shoots as well. We had baby reindeer. Some of that was filmed here. I wanted to sort of accumulate these things. None of those things are very important and all that's important is the people in your life. It's just family.

0:35I mean, as long as I can take those three along with me, I think I could make a nice home anywhere.

0:43Hello, welcome to Homing, the podcast that explores the importance of home in shaping who we are. I'm Matt Gibbard. Firstly, thank you so much for all the positive feedback on the Chris Packham episode. Chris was so insightful and honest that it's very hard to know how to follow on from that. But this episode is one I'm really proud of, I must say, and I'm very hopeful it will capture your imagination and interest in the same way. Today, I'm talking to the amazing Polly Morgan. Polly is an artist who's particularly well known for working with taxidermy. I remember a BBC series years ago called What Do Artists Do All Day?

1:20and it showed her nonchalantly plucking dead birds out of freezers, ready to be dissected and turned into artworks. Her lack of squeamishness is explained by growing up in the English countryside, where she lived with a menagerie of animals and helped her parents take the dead goats to the abattoir. In her 20s, she worked in a bar in Shoreditch, where she became friends with the golden generation of artists known as the YBAs. Despite not having any artistic training, she soon found herself exhibiting alongside them. We recorded this podcast at her family home in a converted pub in Camberwell. The house holds a huge number of stories.

2:01She gave birth in one of the bedrooms. She's made a film there with her artist husband Matt Collishaw and the house was used as the set for two Netflix series you may have heard of, Baby Reindeer and Black Doves. Polly's in the process of selling the house and starting a new life in the countryside and I found her in reflective mood. She talks really openly about some of the tougher experiences she's faced in recent years and how they've triggered hypervigilance and feelings of anxiety. As part of the healing process, she's decided to let go of some of her possessions and live more simply. The fewer things you have, the fewer things are being asked of you, she says.

2:42I think these are really wise words and they sum up the spirit of this podcast in many ways. so here it is and I hope you enjoy listening hi Polly hi thanks so much for inviting us in here and thanks for the tour you grew up in the Cotswolds I think is that right yeah I did what was home like there it was a fairly functioning household I had two older sisters my mom and my dad and my dad variously worked with animals like he was always sort of setting up businesses with different animals he'd gone to um siren sister agricultural college and um when i was born i think he was working artificially inseminating cattle for some company and then i think he was made redundant from that and he then decided to sort of start up his own businesses and there was all sorts of things that he did at that point and i you know i thought i'm probably getting it all wrong and i can i could sort of hear him shouting no it wasn't that but there was something to do with angora goats because we had about 200 angora goats for a while but we didn't live on a farm we lived on a very normal just a house in a village so he would rent the odd field from local farmers for the goats so they were always kind of nearby but not quite you know on our property but then if any of them got sick they would kind of move in with us so they were often like there would be baby goats in the dog beds i remember sometimes coming home to that we had a really old sick goat that we kind of adopted that was often tethered to a tree outside then he moved into i think during the bsc crisis he thought there was a i think there was this kind of belief that maybe ostrich meat was going to take over from beef and beef became a less viable option so he invested in a pair of ostriches but they they didn't live near us i think they were about to move it near and then one of them died and then that all went tits up because they didn't breed um he had llamas and they were up the road um and a little hamlet called kite brook and i remember i just remember riding i just remember being in fields a lot like various fields herding goats and generally being sort of like my dad frustratedly yelling at me to like stop something from escaping or being spat at by llamas we had llamas there's you know it's a weird mishmash of memories and it was kind of fun and eccentric I guess and I had a lot of freedom we were in a village and we just used to go out and play um quite old-fashioned I suppose we'd just go and then we'd come back at supper time and we'd make dams in the in the local in the streams there was a farmer who had a load of bales hay bales that we used to make these amazing dens in but he was always threatening us so then we'd kind of go and find another place to build the dens climbing trees you know it was quite um yeah it was not a bad childhood it definitely instilled a real love of nature and the countryside which is ironic because I my whole teenage years I just remember spending desperate to get out of there and move to a city um always the way isn't it exactly that's just being a teenager I guess it's always the way and then you come full circle and go back again I find but yeah you're on the country yeah never happy but obviously the the the flip side of having animals around is is death right yeah i mean in the context of your work you must have got quite used to the idea of handling dead stuff is that fair oh yeah very very used to that yes because i used to breed hamsters as well um i don't know if it was intentional or just i think it started because we accidentally got a male and we already had a female and then they started breeding and then you know my mom just had so many other preoccupations She had three jobs and she was always having to help out with the animals as well.

6:22And she probably didn't even notice that my bedroom was suddenly overrun with hamsters. And then the cat used to break in and we had two cats, which was not, you know, a great marriage, hamsters and cats. So the cats would always break in and mutilate one or two of them. We'd shut the door and we did our best to protect the hamsters, but somehow the cat would get around it. And I remember at one point there was 19 of them and we didn't have space. So they all went in the bath for a while, the empty bath, obviously no water in it. but we had to put the plug in the bath and just there was lots of little hamsters running around in the bath until my dad was trying to kind of knock up a some sort of hutch for them in the in the garage um so yeah they would they would die I remember getting quite used to just scooping up a dead hamster off my floor um and then I remember a really quite vivid memory of mine when I must have been about seven or eight was when a goat died my dad was he wasn't a vet he very definitely wasn't a vet but he he was convinced that he knew what was wrong and you know how to treat the animals and one of his best friends was a vet and they were always sort of having little arguments with each other because the vet would turn up and say why do you keep taking things into your own hands and I remember my dad dissecting a goat that had died to try and find out what was wrong with it to gun a little autopsy just in the backyard and I just remember him cutting the stomach open and all this grass spilling out the stomach and just being fascinated and thinking so that's where it goes they're eating the grass and it's now inside there and and then so there was a kind of interest in biology and anatomy but it was for me it was always a lot more visceral and physical and I think the problem that I had at school was science was taught in a very boring kind of way where we didn't do any experiments or anything I remember being really jealous a friend of mine went to a school where they cut up a frog and an eyeball and like pleading with my teacher to let us do that and she didn't so so I had no interest really in science because it was all very much like you know just things written on a blackboard um but it was there and I used to have to drive the dead goats to um an abattoir as well they were already dead but they would go to this abattoir because that's where they used to process the meat and it was made into dog food I think but they were often like bloated and smelly by the time they were put in the car and um we would take them I just remember all the windows open on my head out of my mattress because the smell was so bad so yeah after that it really people were I remember I was 23 when I started doing taxidermy and everyone used to say, how can you cut it open?

8:42And that just was never a thing for me. And also because the animals have to be fresh. So I think the really disgusting thing is bad smells or maggots. Those are the things that we tend to recoil from. And mostly you would never skin or try to work with an animal that was rotten because it wouldn't work. All the feather or the fur would fall out. So, yeah, I always used to think, well, why wouldn't you want to skin an animal? Why wouldn't you want to see what was underneath the skin? it didn't it's fascinating the skin is only about five or ten i can't remember the exact percentage it's under 10 i think of our body is our skin so there is so much more that we don't know about unless we've done um medical training none of us are ever going to see that didn't your mum find a scene of carnage with the chickens one day oh yeah we had chickens as well we had so many animals i mean i think we had i was telling this someone the other day had chickens and i said yeah we used to have 19 she was like 19 chickens why do you have 19 i was like i don't know because we We didn't have a very big garden, yeah, but I think we had 19 chickens.

9:37I just remember that there was 19 headless chickens in the morning because somehow I think the fox had basically broken open the hen coop and they'd all tried to escape and that's what they do. They just decapitate them all and then they only take one. Is that right? Yeah, they kill, but then they can only obviously carry one back with them, so they just left all the dead bodies. Yeah. Oh, wow. What was your bedroom like? Did you spend much time in your room? Was that a thing? Yeah, I did spend quite a lot of time in my room. I liked my room. I quite liked my own company. I mean, when I was really young, I remember I would just like make magazines and I would draw pictures of animals and write little things about like, I'd go out with my sister Emily and I would always, we'd have this sort of like little nature club that we'd do together where we'd go and dip pond water and draw tadpoles and, you know, quite kind of virtuous sort of nature stuff and like collect leaves.

10:30And so that, I do remember that for a while. and climbing the trees and bringing all of that stuff back and writing poetry. I used to write a lot of poems about the trees and things. I mean, that's the thing when you're kind of bored, you do get really creative. And I try not to cave in when my kids say they're bored now, because I remember all of that. I just remember how bored I was a lot of the time. And then I'd sit and I'd be really bored. And then I think, well, no one's going to fix this. So then you'd start to do something. And that's always when the most interesting work used to come, I think.

10:59But when I was a teenager, it was just like I think I had a red wall and I had a kind of weird I had I had a chair that my dad made me I remember seeing some sort of catalog came through the the door god knows what it was but anyway it had a chair and a really weird looking chair with a very high back and like one really narrow arm one really fat arm I mean I was always quite interested in design and things being a bit kind of different I never I do remember I I never wanted what other people wanted I always wanted kind of the opposite if anything almost maybe on purpose because I thought well if everyone is into that then I'm going to be into this thing instead because that's going to be more interesting or I'll stand out or whatever it might be I don't know but I would always kind of be drawn to the things that people weren't so interested in and it was such a weird quite ugly chair actually but and it had all these like swirly patterns and colors on it and I just really wanted this chair and I remember my mum and dad saying well we don't you know you don't need a chair and it's 100 quid and we're not buying you a chair and then my dad very sweetly went off and made me a chair this chair he just like looked at it and he kind of cobbled it together out of bits of wood and presented it to me so I remember lying on the kitchen floor like when I'd get back from school I decided to make it black and white checked but tiny little squares only the size of like those little bathroom tiles and I just remember like painstakingly drawing out like it was enormous I had this the back was like up to here and then just like getting these little my mum bought me some humbrol paints and I would just paint black and white black and white and black and white squares and I did finish it in the end and I had it I had it here in the basement I kept it right up until here because I couldn't bring myself to throw that out and I did and actually my friend when we moved out of here I had so much stuff had to go to the the tip and my friend filmed me chucking it off into the skip um because I was a bit like oh this chair this is one thing I feel weird about chucking but I chucked it how do you feel about that now fine yeah yeah it's okay I've got rid of so many things I think it's fine yeah so you're the youngest of three is that right yeah so what what sort of character were you in that three I mean how would you describe that dynamic I think I was always the moderator so um I think actually it's quite a classic thing with three kids like you know the first and the second I don't know if the first and the second always have difficulties maybe it's when the third one comes along they start to have difficulties I'm not sure like I have two and they're really different they're like one's here and the other's like on the completely opposite end of the spectrum which seems to be the case with most people I speak to who have two children, they will say this.

13:30But I think actually there's no coincidence. I was thinking maybe it's an evolutionary thing. You know, maybe we have to be very different in order for our parents to look at, you know, resources are finite, right? So you have to like different things and you have to fill different gaps in the market, I think. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the first two were always so different. And that was exactly my eldest. I think they were very different. One looked more like one parent, one looked more like the other parent. I look like like right in between I look like both sisters I'm the kind of I think I link the two of them together in a way I think I was my mum said I was just really chilled out and I think I think you have to be when you come in that late for a start people aren't really fussing over you the way they are with the older children you kind of get ignored there was no photos of me or anything I thought I was adopted for years because my mum said no but by the time you came along we were sort of over it by then we weren't taking pictures of you we were so excited when Sophie arrived and there's like these little baby books pictures of her in and then slightly smaller baby book for emily and then no baby book for me and so you hear that a lot there don't you there's a sort of flick book of the first one the entire life i get it i'm the same though you do yeah i think it's really interesting you say that about the dynamics it made me think of um there's a sort of slightly niche branch of psychology called um family constellation therapy okay and the idea is that a family or a group of people is a constellation and you know everyone sort of fits together in a slightly dysfunctional way but it kind of works in my case I've got three daughters and we had one and then we had identical twins second time around wow that must be a whole new dynamic yeah yeah exactly it's it's quite a complicated system but it's it's sort of you know they kind of make it work between them and the twins gang up on the other one a bit no what happens is our eldest pairs off with one of the twins just what happened with us though actually is it yeah yeah well it's a constant pairing and leaving one yeah but the pairs change yeah but there's always one slightly yeah we definitely had that i would think i was used as a sort of pawn to play off yeah each other quite a lot with my because you were the most biddable and easy going right yeah yeah i think we have that so i get the impression you had quite a lot of energy though is that is that is that fair yeah I think I was I was creative I definitely had quite a creative way of looking and I just don't think I did the obvious thing or like well came up with necessarily the obvious solution and like I say I think a lot of it came down to just being quite bored I do think if I'd grown up now I worry about this a lot with this you know the whole screen thing and everything when you've just got something constantly if you're bored you just do that and You pick up your phone and look at it.

16:01And I can feel, I mean, I can really feel it sapping my creativity now when I do that. And I know that if I go and put my phone in another room and shut the door and just sit for like 15 minutes, which feels like quite a long time when you're so addicted to a phone, I will start to have full thoughts, you know, that have some sort of like trajectory that go somewhere and I'm not constantly interrupting myself with things. And you don't know it at the time, but it was a real privilege, I guess, to be growing up in the countryside. without those distractions and I wasn't really mollycoddled because my mum was too busy to you know she was always working and so I just kind of I had a lot of independence and freedom and my mum was very good at not um all she really cared about was that you know if we were happy she just had no real kind of ambitions for us in a funny way which sometimes I thought was a bit odd but then I also think it was good it gave us an awful lot of kind of freedom to explore and not worry about failing and messing stuff up.

17:02If you're enjoying this episode and are curious to see inside Polly Morgan's home, we're sharing an exclusive house tour over on Patreon. Polly shows us her art collection, including gifts from artists like Damien Hirst and Dinos Chapman, and some of her own taxidermy pieces. And she takes us down into her studio in the cellar, where she spent many afternoons peeling the skins off snakes. Head to patreon.com slash homingwithmat to take a look. You left the Cotswolds to go to London, didn't you, to study? Yeah. What did you study? I studied English. I didn't study art. And that was purely because I remember being a bit sort of like, it was a bit of a toss-up between doing drama or art for my A-level and I went for drama because for a while in my teens I used to go to a theater group and I liked acting but I stopped I just didn't enjoy it anymore when I came to do it for A-Level and I always regretted not doing art but I think by that point it would have been hard to go to art college and I was good at English I was good at writing and you know interpreting texts and stuff and I just wanted to come to London I had a boyfriend in London I was I just thought everything I was so sort of I think because I was the youngest of three as well so I'd already I'd seen both my sisters go off to universities and you know have that freedom and that you get when you leave home and I felt so ready for it I'd had a boyfriend in London since I was 16 so I'd already been coming up every weekend and I remember just applying to London colleges and I came and I went to Queen Mary College which was in Mile End and a lot of people warned me of this but I didn't listen because I just wanted to come to London but they said look there's not much of a campus thing in London you might not find it's a student as fun but I just thought well I want to go to London anyway so why waste three years in a different city and then I'd have to come to London and they were right there was absolutely no campus at all no there was nothing like that and I didn't really make any friends actually made one or two very superficial friends but not people that I kept up with and because back in those days you had like a grant so there was some money towards like living accommodation but you know I think it only just covered that and I didn't have like financial support from my parents so I got a job and that was a job that I got in the electricity showrooms this bar in Hoxton Square it's all just kind of quite random really when I look back on it but then I wonder was it random was it was I in that area because I was kind of creatively minded and a lot of those people that ended up in that area you know never quite know how much is is um coincidence or or whether you've kind of subtly been steering yourself all along but actually working in that bar and getting that job and then I because I had to get have five shifts or something in order to to make enough money to survive I took on that many shifts and I kind of practically lived there so I'd eat there I'd drink there when I wasn't on my shifts I'd stay there anyway because the drinks would be free or half price anyway all my friends I just made friends with everyone working there and um it just felt it was lovely it felt like uh I was there for six years and well beyond when I graduated and it felt like home and uh so university wasn't really I didn't even go to pick up my certificate or go to the graduation or anything I did graduate but I it sort of meant nothing to me it was really a vehicle to get me to London and um I feel like the Shoreditch Electricity showrooms was my university so didn't your parents get divorced while you're a student is that right yes they did yeah um so when I my mum sort of left at the same time as me I was the youngest of three and she moved out pretty much at the same time And then they divorced shortly afterwards.

20:40Yeah. So did you get the sense that they were waiting for you to go? Oh, yeah. Well, yes, that was definitely the case. My mum had, you know, they hadn't had a happy marriage. They hadn't been happy. I'd never remember it being a happy marriage. And my mum had decided to just sort of stick it out until we all left home, I think, was her thinking. And so she did that. And then the family house then went up for sale. And so I remember when I was 19, actually driving, I'd often finish a shift at the bar. at like 12 or 1 or something I remember driving back to Little Compton this village I grew up in the middle of the night for some reason I don't know why I did it in the middle of the night but I did um to help my dad sort the house out and break the house down so I didn't have a family home from the age of 19 either and my mum was living in a very small rental at that point and my dad then went and lived with a friend of his mum's for a bit and he was sort of between homes so so yeah that kind of that bar brought me up really those people there were very significant in my life.

21:35I just think I wasn't really ready. I was so, I just wanted to be in the city and I was excited to be with the people I wanted to be with doing the things I wanted to do. And also just to something, yeah, one of my best friends died just before I left for London. And so that had happened and then my parents split up and I just wanted to leave it all behind and just like go and have fun. I think I didn't, and going to university, it was very much like you had to read four books a week and I can't read four books a week. I mean, I love reading, but it completely put me off reading. They were thick books as well.

22:04And they weren't, you know, they're kind of dense books that you then had to go and sit through one hour lecture on and write an essay. And then the next week you're on to another book. And I didn't like that way of learning at all. It really put me off reading for a while because I was, I suppose, at school you're more used to studying a text in a bit more depth than that. And I felt like we were kind of just skimming the surface of things. I mean, these days we had chat GPT. I could just read a synopsis of the book and then I could go in with that. but I'd sort of like be skimming these books or trying to read a chapter and just hiding at the back of the lectures really because I didn't have enough to say on the subject and I it was a wasted opportunity really it's a shame because you know they were I noticed that all of the older students all of the mature students they were really engaged asking questions and and I would be the same if I went back to university now um because you're much more ready to take that kind of thing in but I wasn't I was just not mature enough for it I don't think but on the subject of there not being at campus didn't you like live in a slightly random place with a bunch of punks oh that was just after was that that was maybe just after i graduated i think now i first moved into halls of residence in um south woodford and i remember i remember my mum dropping me off there but we were driving we're trying to find it we got really lost and i was in a really bad mood about the whole thing for some reason i just i guess i was just a bit sort of nervous about it all and about meeting people and um I remember really angrily because she was saying oh god it's around here somewhere and I pointed to like the ugliest building I could see which was like this big kind of concrete high-rise overlooking the A12 and I went yeah it's probably in there and she went oh don't be silly darling you know we'll find it and we drove around for ages and sure enough it was in that bloody building and I was like near the top of the building and it was pretty grim I mean it was we'd have one really dirty bathroom to share between about 10 people on one floor they weren't like they are now I've seen the halls of residence I have now they look amazing there was just like there was one building on that little kind of I think there was three of these towers and we were all in one we had one bedroom it was really just like a cell it had a sink and that was it and a bed single bed and um even my mom was a bit sort of like you know she took a lot to sort of she was very tough my mom but she kind of walked in and put the bag she was trying really hard to find something nice to say about it I can tell but she she couldn't um so I hated that and then there was one bar downstairs where people would go but everyone was just going down and getting completely drunk and snogging each other and I already had a boyfriend and I felt a little bit more grown up I think and then I ended up moving into halls in town which was a little bit better but then I lived with friends and yeah I ended up with a group of punks but that was I think three years on and they were like ex-art school students too and they were in a little, it was a little house in Baston Road in Stoke Newington.

24:49And God, I feel so, we lived, we were between two families with young kids. And now like having been that person with the young kids, I feel so bad. They were always knocking on our door and asking us to turn music down. Or, I mean, it wasn't really me, I don't think. It was these other guys. They were lovely. They were all lovely young men, I guess they were. They were like in their late twenties. It was, I answered an ad in The Lute. There used to be a paper called The Lute. I don't even know if it exists anymore, but that's where people would look for flats. And it just advertised a room. And I turned up, they were sort of interviewing people for this room.

25:21And they offered it to me. And the room was tiny, tiny, tiny. You could barely fit a single bed in it. And they lived in such school. My mum used to turn up to visit me with a bottle of bleach because she just said she couldn't go to the loo because it was disgusting. It was like black in that loo. I guess it's just a rite of passage, isn't it? All of that stuff, learning how to look after yourself. And I remember that no one ever washed up. And I would have washed up, but the problem is once you've got five layers of dirty plates, you just think, well, no, screw you. You do your own. I'm not going to do everyone else's.

25:52You're not going to do mine. So then they came up with this system where if people didn't wash up their own plates, you'd put them in their bed and then put the duvet on top of them. That was their solution. And there was this poor guy. He was the landlord's son, and he used to come around practically in tears. His mom was the landlord, and she lived in Jamaica. and she was Jamaican but she had lived in London and she'd come back every now and then and he was terrified of her this the son and he'd come around to just sort of check the house before she came to do a little visit of it and he'd just have his head in his hands just like crying in the kitchen saying guys you've got to do something about this place it was funny but I enjoyed it it was a nice place we had a lot of fun there so you you talked about the bar in Shoreditch and that sort of brought you up in some ways but was that also the link to getting into the art world as well how did the taxidermy thing come about i think it just sort of gave me the idea because i was that i could do it i suppose i had never i didn't know any artists really growing up or very few it wasn't really part of my world my mom was always interested in art and if she had you know she'd have the time she would have taken us to galleries and things but she didn't we didn't tend to have that much time we didn't go on many holidays but she used to if we were in a local you know in the city she would she would try and find an art gallery to take us to but it wasn't a big part of our life and um so I just don't think it really occurred to me that it was something that I could ever do professionally and then suddenly being somewhere where almost everyone around you is doing it professionally either photographers or painters or running galleries or something it's just um yeah you start to realize that anything is possible and I did do a little photography course at some point like a short course and I took a few photos and I was sort of exploring lots of different mediums but everywhere I looked there was people already doing those things very well there was like Nick Waplington and Juergen Teller and all of these people kind of hanging out at the bar and you just sort of think well you don't want to what more can I add to that at the moment when all these people are doing these great things and then there's painter you know painters there was very successful painters there was I don't everywhere see all the corners seem to have been like all of the the markets seem to have been cornered in all the various disciplines and it wasn't like I cynically sat down and thought now what can I do that no one else has done but I think it definitely appealed to me that I was looking for some taxidermy for my basically what happened is I was promoted to bar manager and then the original owners had to sell and I everyone was leaving but the new owners really wanted to keep me on because they saw me as a link between the old place and the new place and they were just very corporate they in some places in Knightsbridge they came and completely trashed the place and ruined it it was awful you know they took out like they had great chefs there all gone they just started putting in like fried spring rolls and it was awful what they did but I didn't know that that was coming and they offered me the flat above the bar um the whole flat for free um as like a little perk if I stayed on and I was living in this tiny this is when I was living with the punks I think in a tiny little room and suddenly I'd like I'd never had any space like that before so I moved in and I had nothing in this flat it was huge it was two floors big open plan really great flat still like a great flat even now if I think back to it by by my new standards it was a great flat and um I had nothing I just had no stuff to put in it I remember it was empty and looking around thinking like oh I need to decorate it somehow but I didn't really have money I just I had a small salary and a big flat and I remember saying to somebody that I wanted to have some taxidermy in there.

29:26I said, I kind of want the birds to look dead on the windowsill, you know, like they've just kind of died there. Cause I just think, I don't know why it's just what I wanted. In fact, I do think I know why. And I don't think, I think everyone used to mistake that for me being a bit goth or like a bit macabre. And actually it wasn't that. I think it's just that taxidermy is a lot more convincing when the animal looks dead because you're not expecting it to move. Whereas if you see a taxidermy bird mid-flight, it's clearly not flying. If you see it perched on a little branch, you know you know that it's not really well maybe for a second you're tricked but not for long and I think the idea of just having this I used to want to keep dead birds when I found them as a child and my mom would explain gently that I'd have to bury them and they were going to rot and this was a way of keeping them and having these beautiful creatures just around it was like a little connection to nature I suppose but I don't think I really understood that at the time and everyone just thought it was a bit odd but anyway my friend said well we you know you should just commission a taxidermist to do that for you and I said well I can't I don't think I could afford that could I and I started looking into it and I couldn't afford it but I found this taxidermy teacher well he was a taxidermist in Scotland and he offered lessons but he didn't used to do many lessons and I just phoned him up one day and I asked him and it was really simple he just said yeah of course and he lived just outside Edinburgh on this estuary in an old tower it was all very magical looking and my friend was at university in Edinburgh so I used to go and crash on her floor and just I had a one day lesson with him where I did a very very rushed pigeon he wouldn't let me make it look dead because he said that you have to learn how to make them look alive and then you can kind of deconstruct afterwards which was good advice well I was a bit disappointed to come back with a live looking pigeon but it was lovely mostly because he did it he did almost all of it but I felt like I knew the basics and then I would practice on my kitchen table in my lovely flat and I would send him pictures of things I would do and we'd just talk on the phone he kind of explained to me where it might have gone wrong and then I used to go back and visit him and I don't know I think it was just everyone was really interested in what I was doing suddenly it was really nice I was really interested in it I love it was a perfect marriage of art and science and the science that really engaged me because I could see and it was so tactile and you can feel the bones and you can understand the way they connect together and I couldn't even now name all the different parts of a skeleton but I know where they are and I know the lengths and how they fit together and you know if I'm stroking an animal, I know exactly what it looks like underneath the skin at that point.

31:46And that was all really interesting to me. And everyone responded really positively to it, all of the people that I was hanging out with. And people said, I want to see what you're doing, you know. And co-manager of my bar went to set up a bar called Bistrotech. And he said, come and do some work in Bistrotech. We've got these domes. Come and put some works in there. We'll have a little party for you. And it was lovely. It was just a sort of, it felt like the right thing at the right time and um yeah it was a catalyst I love this idea that you're you know by day you're kind of deconstructing pigeons upstairs and then by night you're coming down to the bar and running it as a manager it's such an interesting it's such an interesting sort of formative experience my customers would come bring me dead birds and things you know it became wide yeah because you have to you don't I didn't want to kill anything I don't think it's even illegal to kill stuff for taxidermy but um I'd have to put the word out I was looking for things and it was quite hard to find things in the beginning so yeah I'd start sort of get these little offerings from people phone calls at 10 o 'clock at night saying they just found a mouse somewhere so you are not a trained artist yet you found yourself in the art world did you feel like an outsider I mean do you even accept that now how do you feel like you fit into the art world I don't think I do, really.

33:03I do think I'm an outsider. And the thing is, I didn't really care to start with at all because I came at it so kind of obliquely. It hadn't been a plan of mine. And I realized how kind of privileged this sounds, I guess. But I wasn't... Right at the beginning, I wasn't trying to be an artist. I wasn't impressed particularly by these artists that came to the bar because I didn't know who half of them were. So they were just customers. And then some of them became my friends. some of them I thought were horrible um but it was only later that I then started in a way like the more I learned the harder it became to be an artist in a way because the more kind of um humbling it was and I suddenly I do remember being at the beginning just coasting and thinking this is great yeah I'll just make something and they like it and they'll show it and then suddenly someone will buy it and it all felt very kind of quite easy and I I did feel a bit bad about that because I also had friends I'd made who were really struggling to be artists and they weren't getting exhibitions and they weren't selling things and um I must have been really annoying to them um but then I remember being in an exhibition I think it might have been the Palant House in Chichester it was like a proper sort of museum and suddenly realizing you know there were some really serious artists there that I was showing amongst and I just suddenly thought oh my god this is so embarrassing I'm not good enough for any of this and like I started to learn more about these people and and about art generally and I felt really silly and I felt like I was just a bit of a pretender like I somehow kind of what's that word you give people who don't think they're good enough imposter syndrome yeah I don't think it was imposter syndrome because like I was an imposter and I think I had coasted very for a while like I think I'd got away with quite a lot in the beginning um got away with showing work that wasn't really probably good enough and it was all stuff that if I'd been at university I would have gone into a crit and everyone would have demolished it and I would have gone with my tail between my legs and made something a bit better next time but no one did that everyone just kept saying yeah great well you know buy it we'll show it so then I had to kind of do it to myself and then and then also like the market would do it to me suddenly like people would just stop buying you know the things changed a lot as I got older I had this big run in my 20s where I just people wanted to buy my work people really wanted to know what I was making and they wanted to show it and they bought it and I made enough money because I had never I didn't have any input from my parents financially and I suddenly found myself in a position where I could put a deposit down on a house which was just extraordinary and and yet at the time I sort of thought well that's great I'll buy a house I really always wanted that sort of security for myself and I remember having this no one would give me a mortgage because my I'm an artist and you know there's too big a fluctuation in your income.

35:48And I remember the only people who would give me a mortgage were Cootes Bank, because they kind of, they give mortgages to artists and sports people and people with kind of like more interesting, less predictable careers. And I remember I had to have a meeting with the bank manager at Cootes Bank, and it was in a little private room and we had like a three course meal. And I remember him saying to me, you know, do you think this, these earnings that you've made over the last few years projecting forward, do you think you'll continue to earn? like that and I was like definitely absolutely yes of course I will yeah and I won't have any problem meeting the payments and and I kind of believed it I think and I remember saying to my mum you know I was buying this house that was like it's really expensive and for her it was really expensive and that I had a 500 grand mortgage and I remember her being quite kind of like saying are you sure about this done I was like yeah it's fine it's gonna be all right and of course it wasn't easy and it wasn't fine and everything you tailed the very I was kind of like at the peak at that moment and of course people stopped buying the work and I couldn't afford to continue living there and but at the same time I could afford to hang on to it by moving out and renting it out and so on and I think it was definitely the best decision I ever made but I do look back on that person sometimes and think god you just had no idea well it's it's kind of the ignorance of you it's amazing but it's such a superpower in a way because you just you just charge through all these incredible opportunities thinking fine yeah I can I'll deal with all of that when it happens and you do deal with it when it happens but um if i i don't think the person i am now would ever have done that of like speculated on that house and that kind of a mortgage yeah it was a good thing to do it was it was it was a great thing to do it's the best thing i ever did so let's talk about this place um so we're in camberwell yeah um you can probably hear the the buses roaring away in the background um so this was a pub what was it like when you got here was it actually a pub when you bought it no it had been run for i think seven or eight years as a um location for shoots for like stills films tv that kind of thing so no one was actually living here i don't think anyone was living here i think i think people had sort of crashed here it didn't look particularly lived in no it was pretty run down but it had been a pub before that so i think they'd bought it as a pub okay and i think um because actually my husband used to he went to um goldsmiths years ago and he drank here when he was at goldsmiths so it had been a sort of popular quite long-running south london pub yeah um so your husband matt collisher was an artist as well how long have you been together and how did you get together we've been together um 17 years i think now okay and we'd known each other for a long time i remember i first met him when i was 19 and working at the electricity showrooms i knew his brother better he's both his brothers used to drink there a lot and he used to drink that he used to go out with tracy emin at that time and they would often i just remember they would always turn up at closing time and we would always be there'd be this collective eye roll as they'd turn they'd all turn up just as we they were friends with the owner and everyone would be like oh yes and no one really argued with tracy so she would sort of come in drunk and say she wanted wine and you just like look at the owner thinking and he'd go you just give her wine so we'd then have to sort of stay on and like entertain them So I just remember thinking he was a bit of a pain and he was, you know, I only ever saw him when he was drunk at like 2am really.

39:13And his brothers were probably even worse. They were always, they'd turn up more regularly than him also at closing time. But, you know, one of his brothers, Andy, was very fun and he was very good friends with the owner. And he was, he was a bit of a kind of like East London fixture. So I knew Matt, but not terribly well just to sort of say hi to. It might have been when I left the bar, I got to know him a bit better. and then I was working as an artist so I did actually, I mean our work, there's quite a lot of sort of like common ground and themes and things and I think I was in a show with him at the Haunch of Venison and we just had a lot of the same group of friends.

39:48We ended up hanging out together a lot and then he was in a very brief marriage and I just split up from, I was briefly engaged to someone and then we got together after that but not until I was 27 or 8 I think so I'd known him for a good nine years or something. So did you buy this place together? Well, not technically, no. I bought the place in Hackney that I just mentioned. And he bought this place. So at the same time, we found ourselves. So Matt, he's a well-known artist, and he's part of a group of well-known artists. But of all of them, he didn't financially do as well as a lot. You know, his better-known contemporaries, like Damien and Tracy and Sarah Lucas, all went on to these kind of great riches.

40:27And Matt had a son when he was 23, from a very sort of brief relationship. And he ended up spending a lot of time looking after a baby, I think, while they were kind of out doing their work and, you know, being out and about, I guess. And so I don't know if it was that. He says it might be something to do with that. But I don't know. I also think his work, his work is quite sort of a bit more, it's quite cerebral, Matt. I think it takes a while to sort of get, he reads a hell of a lot of books. He really like does these deep dives into subjects. And I think he's the kind of artist that he's just kind of got better with age.

41:02The more work he makes, the more sense you can make of all of the work that came before. And I think, you know, maybe some people originally thought his first works were just intentionally shocking, which is definitely something that he would never have wanted to do. So his was a kind of more of a slow build, his career, and he'd never bought anywhere before. And suddenly we both found ourselves in positions financially to buy somewhere. But we weren't, you know, I was always very determined. He had just come out of a short marriage. He wasn't interested in marrying or anything. I never thought I wanted to get married and I made that very clear and I'd um I think because of the way my parents had lived and the way that my my mum had sort of stayed in an unhappy marriage for financial reasons really um if she'd been independently wealthy she would have probably they would have split up a lot earlier and she would have bought a house but I think that those things do they can change the course of your life you know how much money you have whether you have your your own property and um I was very determined to buy my own house I always that was like my one goal was just to sort of have that.

42:02And then once I had that, I would feel kind of safe. So we did that. We bought houses separately and Matt found this and he couldn't quite afford it. So he went in with a friend of his. But we found it together in that, actually the girlfriend of his son found it on this website called Amazing Space, I think it was called. And she forwarded the link and we all thought it looked great. So we all met here. I think she was there. She was here, Lauren and Alex, Matt's son, who by this stage would have been 18, 19, something like that. And Matt and I, and we all met here and we all just thought it was amazing because we'd never seen anywhere this big.

42:35You know, we'd all been renting much smaller places and Matt had always had a separate studio. And so it kind of felt like a joint purchase in many ways. But he lived here alone or with his friend. And I used to just come and stay at the weekends and live in my place for the first sort of eight years or something. And then it was only when I got pregnant with our first son that I moved in. So you were here how many years? um so we moved out when clifford was eight so i would have about eight years just a bit over eight and a half years i think i was here okay so i mean i've never done a podcast like this before and it's actually really fascinating but you're in the process of moving out yeah and so you know you'll see from the film footage like there's some stuff but there's not all of your stuff clearly what's that like for you and and and and how would you describe the experience of being here as a family for that period of time what does this place kind of mean to you I mean it's funny it's it means a lot on the one hand and it's sort of profoundly important and yet on the other hand I can quite easily let it go I'm not quite sure why or how that is I suppose just because in life life is a series of letting things go it's a series of little losses really um and also you spend I think you spend a lot of your time your life accumulating things and people and then slowly you start to certainly in my case anyway I've like I've been really sort of decluttering trying to get down to the very bare essentials I remember Matt was describing it about people actually he said he said he was talking about coming back into London and running into someone in the street that he hadn't seen for ages and that he didn't particularly want to run into and he said it's funny like you spend like the first half of your life trying to meet people and then the second half of your life running away from them and I thought but that's kind of true also almost with stuff I think I I wanted to sort of accumulate these things for some reason because I felt like they said something they meant something to me or they said something about me and then you sort of realize that actually they don't and none of those things are very important and all that's important is the people in your life so I'm taking my children with me if I was leaving them here it would be very different and it has served us really really beautifully in the years that we were here it's I feel like we really really rinsed it like we really used this building and that's what was really lovely about it like every every room something lots of amazing things have happened in every room of the house Tell us a couple of those memories.

45:19Well, I gave birth to my second son in one of the bedrooms, the only bedroom that's never actually been occupied by me. And that was accidental, wasn't it? That was an accident, really, yes, because I think I'd never been one of these women who'd just planned on this lovely home birth. I felt very realistic about it, like I'm going to be in pain, I'm going to need medication. So for the first child, that was just, it was such a long labour anyway. It was over 30 hours I got to hospital and they gave me the medication and you know it happened and the second one I in hindsight I realized that the midwives were trying to sort of trick me into a home birth they were just kept trying to steer me in that direction and I kept sort of keeping open they say what's your plan what's this but I never understood the whole birth plan thing because I thought how can you plan for a birth you know I don't know how long it's going to take or where I'm going to be when I go into labor so I'd sort of say well you know we'll see well you know maybe I live nice and near the hospital so and then I called them when my contraction started and they just sort of said, oh, we'll get in the bath and we'll be with you really soon.

46:16And they just didn't come for ages. And I think they were about an hour and a half. And by that stage, they'd said, well, it's too late to go anywhere. So I ended up having him at home, which was lovely, lovely in hindsight. I mean, hell at the time because you haven't got all the drugs that you had in the first time around. But it was lovely to have him here. And it was lovely to know that he was born here and to wake up with him in my own bed. And so I'm grateful to them for doing that. What else has happened here? I have my 40th birthday here, which was a really lovely big dinner downstairs and partying.

46:48I mean, everything's happened here. That's the thing. We've had so many, everyone in our lives has been through this building. And even those who are not in our lives sometimes who come for, I don't know, a shoot. We rent out for shoots sometimes. Every time they come, they say to us that they've been here before in the past because this building used to be used for a shoot. And every time I meet anyone out about in London, if I say I'm from Camberwell, and they say, oh, where? And I say, oh, this pub on Camberwell New York. They all know it. They say, oh, I always wonder what goes on in that building.

47:17We've made films here. Like what? Well, Matt made a film for this project that he was doing with this orchestra, where we had to sort of turn the ground floor into effectively like an old people's. It was a series of scenes of old people passing away in bed. and so we had to dress the room differently like seven times so we had this kind of this one sort of stock room that we we built and um and we would change that over and i had to make a for that film he also had um he recreated this thing called a sky burial which is um what they do in tibet where they put the ground's too hard to bury people so they carry up the bodies or they dismember the bodies even sometimes to the top of the mountain and the um the vultures carry them off wow and he needed a skeleton and he said oh you'll be good at that kind of thing can you do that so we bought a plastic skeleton and then um with my friend Robert we had that splayed out on the table and we were basically just making like red paper pulp sort of like just making it look like bits of flesh and tissue on this skeleton um with my little son watching the whole thing I remember he said he thought it looked like a flamingo that's why I remember very sweet um and we've rented out for shoots as well we had baby reindeer some of that was filmed here and uh black doves that were on netflix they were they were filmed here and countless other things it's such a good building that's the thing and that space downstairs particularly is so big and adaptable um so down in the cellar is your studio in inverted commas or was your studio i find that really interesting obviously as an artist you have to use space where you can find it right and you had the space and you did it but yeah you know low ceiling strip lighting no natural light what what was that like for you working in that space it wasn't very efficient you know it was a bit grim um but i always put a positive spin on it i'm quite a positive person on the whole i'm very optimistic and um i tend to try and just see the best in everything and it was either that or not work at all i guess when i had a baby or young children and um i felt really happy that i had i was i'd come from a much nicer studio in Hackney but I genuinely felt very happy to have that space here and to sort of do something with it um the problem was there was just too much stuff in there I think because I put the studio into a basement that was already used a bit of storage so I was kind of slotting in around space that was already filled so there was just never enough kind of order and it was never kind of clean enough I could never find things and I just I think really it It was just an inefficient way of working because I guess I just didn't really love being down there.

49:57I always wanted to come back up. I wanted to come back up into the light. I wanted to come back to my family. So I'd go down and I would just do what I had to do down there and then come back up again. And if it had been a more pleasing space, I would have probably spent more time organizing and tidying. And I'm happy to have a new studio where I moved into an empty building and I managed to kind of build it from the ground up. So now I know where everything is and it's just a lot more efficient. I get things done quicker. So to give us a picture of that time, you would have been breastfeeding, raising children and then what, putting them down to sleep and then going down to the cellar and working.

50:39Is that right? Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. That's full on. So, yeah, there'd be a few hours or 20. I'd have a baby monitor down there with me and I would run down and it's tricky because I've realized that so much as an artist I think you really unless you're in the middle of something you know exactly what you're doing and you're doing this the kind of like the grunt work where you're like repeating a task over and over again which is quite rare it's really hard to get anything done in these like half an hour hour bursts because I'd go down there and it would take me just like get my brain back in order and remember what I was doing and what I'm what I had been doing the last time I was down there finding all of the right stuff and then you'd hear this little like on the monitor and I was like oh god I just have to go back upstairs again so I don't think I did anything particularly great during that time but it was still just having it there it's really it's good it's it's a nice it's a it's a hard time for like women when that that early stage when the babies are really young and you're you're like a machine and you're either just feeding or sleeping or changing and nappies and just to have that little space to go down and sit and think sometimes and sometimes just to play with the materials I think that was kind of enough for me for a while yeah in terms of your work that it strikes me that this kind of there's this theme of sort of deception right in that you're using things like fingernail lacquers and you know snake skins and manipulating those just just tell us about that well I think it's kind of all of a continuum with taxidermy because I don't do a lot of taxidermy now at all and what I do do is I work with I make a lot of sculptures with snake scales or parts of snake bodies in but they're cast from the body and I don't use the skin anymore because the skin never it's very rare for the skin to dry in such a way that it's that it really looks exactly like a snake I think because the thing is with um taxidermy you're you're very dependent on the feathers and the fur to kind of hide the skin as it dry it dries like a shrink wrap and it's so it becomes kind of crispy dry it looks dry it looks parched but the feathers and the fur cover that so you don't see it but with a snake obviously it doesn't have that so and and the whole thing about snakes is they've got this lovely kind of like incredibly smooth shiny surface and you don't really you know you can sand them and you can put paint on them and you can varnish them and you can try your best to sort of recreate it but I realized that no matter how good I got at recreating it it was never better than actually just casting the body and painting directly onto the cast which is what I now do and I also started using the packaging in my work and sort of casting like polystyrene packaging that the objects come in these kind of they're like these kind of very modern kind of fossils in a way because you just see this cavity and you can't necessarily work out what what was in it but and I I didn't really see the link for a while between that and the taxidermy but there's a it is a very obvious link because they're all sort of like a 3d trompe l 'oeil really like the very fact that i wanted the birds to look dead in the beginning it was because it was that kind of trickery it was trying to hang on to something that you don't hang on to and even even like the objects that i cast and paint up i sometimes use blocks of wood and things like that and sometimes i'll cast and paint them up and they just look like wood but they're not and they would just be like a little lump of wood that i had lying on the floor and off cut from something that I was using in the studio and I like that idea of kind of commemorating that somehow and making that last you know that tiny little incidental bit of wood or that little bird that was going to rot um and those polystyrene ends that you know people just chuck into landfill that actually say a lot about us not just personally but as a kind of society what we're buying what we prize particularly during covid everyone was buying stuff and everything's all being delivered to the houses and i was just i imagined like in years to come the landfill of these things and what those cavities would sort of the clues that like future archaeologists could get from our society from analyzing those cavities and do you in terms of your work do you do you like living with it do you like having it around I do now and that's really and that's a really nice and quite a new feeling and I I had a really long period of kind of like kind of artist block I suppose you'd call it during my 30s I think it was when I was sort of transitioning from more a bit more traditional taxidermy to what I'm doing now I couldn't I couldn't quite I was feeling my way and I just didn't I thought it was normal to not like your work I remember being in an exhibition I'd done in 2012 and it was a really well attended opening and everyone's asked me questions about the work and things were selling and I remember just feeling really hollow and awful and like a fraud and like I didn't like anything in the room and I just felt deeply embarrassed and I it was a horrible feeling and I remember thinking I don't ever want to do that again but then I couldn't quite work out why why did I feel like that and I kept saying to other artists you know do you feel like this and they would be like not really and uh and I don't feel like that at all anymore I feel I think I was just a bit lost I didn't quite know what I was saying or where I was going with any of it and I I'd fallen into this trap where I'd had a bit of early success so the more kind of commercially driven galleries wanted me to do something they didn't really care what I did they just thought just do something and we'll show it and hopefully we'll sell it and when you're self-employed and when you've got a big mortgage to pay you just say yes and you think these opportunities might dry up if you don't say yes to them and so I was on a bit of a treadmill of just making stuff and I just go to the studio and I sort of think like what would Polly Morgan make because I didn't really feel like that person anymore and I would just make something but not really love it and now I've come I really very consciously pulled back from all of that and I and it was quite helpful having the kids because I had another occupation and something that I could focus on during that time and actually having them I don't know whether it was them that kind of like did something it was like the dam unblocked at that point and I suddenly knew what I was doing and what I wanted to say.

56:38And since then, yeah, if I'm not proud of my work, if I don't want to live with my work, if I don't want to hang it on the work, then now I know that that's a sign that it hasn't worked and I wouldn't exhibit it either. Yeah. And certainly here it looks like you've been living with a lot of other artists' work as well. So you've got a couple behind you, a couple of quite big Damien Hirst pharmacy cabinets. It's actually one, but it's in two parts and we don't quite have the height to do one over the other. Oh, okay, it's deconstructed. It's slightly deconstructed either side of the chimney breast, yeah.

57:09And then you've got a Dinos Chapman piece above the fireplace. So do you stop seeing them after a while? I think with anything you do a little bit. I think that's why people have rehangs, isn't it? Because actually if you just move stuff around, you notice it again. And that's what's really nice about moving from here. So most of our stuff is now gone and we are renting somewhere. It's a lovely, lovely place, but it's not ours. we're renting it and at some point we will buy again in that area but just like taking all of the things you know there's a lot of things I took that I particularly love some of them have come back here to sort of furnish this place a little bit while it's for sale but just putting them in a completely different environment is more of a kind of it's like a Cotswold stone yeah it used to be a stable and kind of hayloft where we are now and it's converted it was um it's on this estate called Lipiat Park that was owned by the sculptor Lynn Chadwick and he used to use it as his studio many years ago so it's got these kind of now like big high ceilings and whitewashed walls and everything but it's an old building and it doesn't look it looks very you know the walls are kind of curvy and the artwork would look so different there and it really really just refreshed it all in my mind it was it was nice I loved doing that because you do start to see things afresh I think as soon as you change their environment but presumably most of the stuff that you've got has been swapped with other artists you know and things like that right Yeah, it's mostly, they're either gifts or we've done, I've done a few swaps with other artists, yeah, and then I've been given things over the years.

58:41Matt's been given lots of stuff over the years. Yeah, we've never really been in a position to buy. I did buy, I bought a little after my dad died. I remember I had like a little bit, a tiny bit of money came in and I remember thinking, I don't want it. It was like 10 grand or something and I remember thinking, I could just easily put this towards the mortgage payments, but I wanted to buy something solid with it. So I bought this little painting by Celia Hempton, which I still have and love. And that's actually in the new house. So I've never really bought anything for more than about three or four thousand pounds.

59:09I bought that. And then I bought, that's about it, I think. Tiny little painting for about 600 pounds from an American artist whose name I've forgotten. So, no, we're lucky because we haven't had to. And honestly, even if we weren't given, if we hadn't been given things by friends, we have our own work that we can put on the walls. But, yeah, it's funny. I mean, neither of us have ever been in a position to be able to afford to buy our own work. It's interesting. You get that sometimes. You get collectors getting back in touch saying that they want to sell something and offering it to you first before we put it on auction.