As the LA-based Melbourne artist’s surreal photographs grace Australian galleries, she talks selfies, Nick Cave and shooting the Queen
The group of friends would go on to become some of Australia’s most important artists, film-makers and musicians. But in Melbourne in the 1980s, they were just kids: young, hanging out, with an inexhaustible appetite for partying.
It was the era of punk and the “little band scene”, where small bands formed and dissolved over the course of a night or a week, playing in venues around St Kilda and Fitzroy.
Everybody was doing drugs and drinking and sleeping with everyone else – and it was stimulating creativelyPolly BorlandThe dark side of the scene was captured in Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs in Space (starring Michael Hutchence as a heroin addict), filmed in Richmond in the mid-80s.
But three friends from around that time – film-maker John Hillcoat, musician Nick Cave and artist Polly Borland – have thrived since: Cave’s decades-long music career branched into books, festival curation and film; Hillcoat has enjoyed global success with movies such as The Proposition and The Road; and Borland is currently the subject of a 60-work retrospective at the NGV – Pollyverse – staged as part of the Melbourne festival.
Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, she says those early years in Melbourne were “kind of a free-for-all”.
“At parties it was a mishmash of different types of people from different disciplines. There were painters, photographers, film-makers, musicians, actors, criminals, fashion designers, working-class people, middle-class people – so many different types of people. A lot of it was centred around the music scene. Every Friday night and every Saturday night we’d go to the Crystal Ballroom, and Nick Cave and the Boys Next Door and all those punk bands would play.”
Borland had been at high school with Lowenstein and worked on that film along with her sister, glass artist Emma Borland. “Life was a bit like [Dogs in Space]. Everybody was doing drugs and drinking and sleeping with everyone else – and it was stimulating creatively. A lot of us were very ambitious and we were very in awe of England, all the magazines – the Face, ID magazine. Everyone was looking towards England. People didn’t identify with the Aussie rock around at the time … London was the place to be.”
Borland married Hillcoat, and the pair moved to London later in the 80s. “[Hillcoat] had a just made a film – Ghosts … of the Civil Dead – and we knew a few people in London. But initially it was a really hard slog. It took me three years of hanging in there before I got work as a photographer.”
In Australia, Borland had begun making a name for herself, shooting for Australian Vogue. But in London, “I had to take a waitressing job, work that I had only ever done when I was a student.
“When I hit England, there was the explosion of the YBA [young British artist], people like Damien Hirst. I could have got in on that but I was doing editorial work. Eventually I ended up where I needed to be anyway,” she says. “I kind of did waste time but I flew all over the world and photographed really interesting people, so it was fun in that respect.”
But ultimately, the work she was doing wasn’t art. “I used to do portraiture but I had only ever wanted to be an artist. If you are taking a portrait of someone, you can’t put a stocking over them,” she says, referencing a common motif in her work. “It’s the limitation of the job – and you only get a certain amount of time.”
But being a portrait photographer did give Borland access to high-profile people – and in 2002, she took a photo of the Queen, commissioned by the palace for the golden jubilee, which quickly became iconic for its pop, modern aesthetic.
She was given only a few minutes to get the shot.
“It was very stressful,” says Borland, who shot the photo on film. The backdrop was a glittering gold cloth that she had bought from erotic lingerie and sex toy shop, Ann Summers. The result is very bright and almost frightening in its garishness, but also quite intimate, as the Queen is shot close-up.
Borland has since commissioned prisoners who were trained in needlework to make a tapestry of the portrait, which is also displayed as part of the NGV retrospective. She acknowledges there is irony of having prisoners incarcerated “at her Majesty’s pleasure”, stitching a picture of the Queen.
As a renowned magazine photographer, taking portraits and shooting fashion spreads, Borland had the money, time and space to pursue her art. This current phase of her career is her richest and most authentic, she says – and the work that launched it was her 2001 series The Babies: arresting portraits featuring grown men who like to dress as babies. They shave their body hair, wear nappies and roll around on the ground. The work took five years to create and makes for unsettling viewing, yet the images are bright, almost cheerful. Borland is not passing judgment.
Her subsequent series Bunny, featuring Game of Thrones actress Gwendoline Christie, subverts the Playboy stereotype, showing nudes through a female gaze. In one image, the Playboy bunny ears are too long, making the model look cartoonish. Christie and Borland, who met in Brighton (where they both lived at the time), collaborated on the photographs over five years, with Christie suggesting props or clothing.
And then there are the pictures of bodies covered up – such as Nick Cave, unrecognisable with a giant stocking over his head, a blue wig and garish red lipstick. “It’s sort of about this idea of revealing and hiding at the same time,” Borland told Broadsheet in 2010.
“Polly has always worked outside of the system,” Nick Cave told the Age last year. “She is, of course, the most extraordinary portrait photographer. I mean, really quite thrilling. And a great fashion photographer, as well. Her other work has become increasingly challenging as her subjects become more and more brutalised and reduced to the neurotic essence.”
And later this month, Borland’s newest work, Morph, which is also on display in Melbourne, will come to Sydney.
Morph is a large-scale, surreal work of photographs, each featuring a person stuffed, sausage-like, into a stocking until they are no longer recognisably human. “The dream sequence in Dumbo, where Dumbo gets drunk with the mouse, was a big influence,” says Borland.
“It was supposed to be preconscious. There was an unconscious trance-like state in those figures, and originally I didn’t want them to be figures, I was trying to create my own creatures and slowly they grew legs and arms and became more human. It was definitely an evolution into humanness – originally it was meant to be hallucinogenic, mindscape experiences.”
I mention a series of striking works in the retrospective: a group of nude photographs from Bunny that have been folded into lenticulars, their perspective shifting depending on where you stand in the room.
“I had certain images that I thought would be really good to do lenticulars with. I photographed nudes of my model and it came together pretty easily; the framing was trial and error,” says Borland.
“A lot of how I work is pretty basic,” Borland says. “It’s conceptual, but also revealing who’s inside the costume, their identity, who’s human and what’s not.”
Borland is now back in her studio in Los Angeles creating a new work around the concept of the selfie.
“The selfie work is confronting my ageing body. They are nudes basically, so I decided to use my iPhone and do what everyone else is doing but not beautifying or hiding anything.
“It’s about the body’s decay as one grows older,” she says. “Also it was time for me to do to myself what I did to others.”
Polly Borland’s Polyverse is at NGV Australia until 3 February 2019, as part of Melbourne festival; Polymorph is on at Sullivan + Strumpf in Sydney from 24 November-22 December
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