95 Scope: (Art & Design), 19, 2020 Article TAXIDERMY Michele Beevors Once upon a time a student bought a dead dog to an art school to exhibit it as an art work. This problem has led me to various places where I wouldn’t normally go, to read things which I’m not interested in, and to examine the inadequacies of my own productivity in relation to it. The dog was not taxidermied, but frozen. The dog had been hit by a car, stolen from a freezer, and exhibited as a memento-mori with other bits of detritus on an upturned milk crate as a plinth, there were scrawlings on the wall, against this and that. Death punching life in the face. In light of this incident. I fnd the art work of Polly Morgan outrageous, particularly the twisted snake sculptures. 1 I’m repulsed by taxidermy, but I use the stuffed versions of animals at various museums as reference material in my own practice. Polly Morgan uses taxidermy in her art work.The twisted and knotted skins of snakes sometimes displayed foating in space, sometimes twist around some other abstract modernist form or display device. The objects are quite small, to go in your home, on a shelf, or a side table, beside a lamp or a book. I imagine one here, in the living room, on the coffee table. I don’t think it would be a happy arrangement. Snakes coil when they are trying to kill something. The death of an animal is enacted doubly in these works. The snake, and whatever its absent prey was, is alluded to by the coil. In Australia, we have an admiration, and respect mixed with fear of snakes; this is healthy, it keeps you alive. “They won’t bother you unless you bother them” and “walk lightly, carry a big stick”, are some of the things we were told. Polly Morgan’s sculptures of taxidermied snakes, scare me. I tell myself that the snake is not alive but my animal brain thinks the snake is harmful, my animal brain wants to fee. My rational brain understands why this is happening, and also about that dead dog. Who buys these works? How do they live with them? Is the invocation of the nearly alive snake, the vicarious thrill, the threat of it, motivation? Is it an indifference, a fashion statement, a curiosity? Is it because it is innately beautiful /scary or have we just become so accustomed to seeing taxidermied things, that the commodifed and coded animal skins are now so ubiquitous, and encounters with the natural world so rare, that the fundamental fear associated with the animal has dissipated? If we were to look at the animal skin as a formal device in Morgan’s works Metanoia, the viewer is allowed the pleasure of consuming the skin without threat of the skin. The pattern moves as the eyes of the viewer follow the curves up and down and around the work, and this allows a concentrated view, a view that moves over the surface of the thing.This is a practice highlighted in modern sculpture and draws on specifcally modern strategies. A formal reading handed down from Antony Caro and Henry Moore, whose strategy “truth to materials” 2 , sees the material, in this instance the dead animal, conform to a shape. 3 Since the snakes in Morgan’s sculptures in many cases don’t have heads, or if they do the head is buried within the coil of the body so it looks like the animal is sleeping, thus allowing the fascinated gaze. Understanding the business end of the snake is very important. A headless snake ensures that fear is suppressed in favour of pleasure. Botched or otherwise (taste and horror) are entwined in Morgan’s sculptures. Steve Baker’s 2000 book, “The Post-Modern Animal”, addresses some of the concerns that were beginning to be highlighted around arts interaction with issues relating to animals at the turn of the century. . 4 In a passage from DOI https://doi.org/10.34074/scop.1019005