Taxidermist Polly Morgan’s Art on View

Already popular among fellow artists and celebrities from Kate Moss to Courtney Love, taxidermist Polly Morgan’s latest series Resurrection is on sale in London. The artist’s extremely dark work, now being sold at Damien Hirst’s Other Criteria Gallery, often includes the heads of dead birds, which leads many to wonder about her past. “My mother always said I was a morbid child. But I think the fact is—this sounds pretentious, I know—that I was just an artist, though I didn’t know it,” Morgan told the London Evening Standard. “I think all artists are a bit morbid. All the ones I know are.” The Brit remembers being surrounded by death from an early age as she’d hang her head out the car window as her mother drove her and goat corpses to the abattoir to be turned into dog food. Taxidermy, she says, is “nothing, really, compared to that.” Considering Morgan’s comfort with slicing and dicing small creatures, it’s no surprise that she was once tempted by roadkill—a “really nice sweet young fresh female fox,” she recalls—and cooked a bit of its leg with garlic and red wine. Unfortunately, the artist says, “it wasn’t very nice.” Perhaps roadkill is best for stuffing, not eating, considering her works have sold for as much as £85,000.