“ . . . a personification of human feeling, wrought with tension, anxiety, and pain.”
Ballooning and contouring, anthropomorphic squidgy-like sculptures take centre stage in white cube aesthetics. Transcending expectations, they demand a closer inspection – one finally given to the audience by this surrealist artist. No longer bound by the photograph, Polly Borland’s oeuvre extends into three-dimensional sculptural form.
From a previous show: BOD, 2022, cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish, 61 × 42.5 × 27cm, edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs
Photograph: Aaron Anderson
Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney/Melbourne
The Los Angeles-based Australian artist presents Puffs. A deliberate concealing and revealing; tightness and energy, bound, and wound, up. Questioning their materiality, these fleshy sculptures defy appearance, juxtaposing their supple surfaces against rigid structural forms at two feet tall. The works oscillate between allure and discomfort, inviting viewers to examine the interplay of surface and volume.
They follow on from her previous sculptural works, BOD, 2023, Blob Out, 2023, and We Are Family, 2024, and the photographic series of similar iconography, Smudge, 2010–3, Monster, 2017, Morph, 2018, and even much earlier works such as the now iconic Bunny, 2004–8 series where actor Gwendoline Christie’s six-foot-two body is extended even further through abstracted stocking-like limbs.
Rabbit, 2025, work in progress, digital renders
Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney/Melbourne
For Puffs, Borland returns to more of the human form. In a world where the body is political and the ownership of what happens to it is more widely discussed than ever before, the artist, from her US studio, invites critical thought. In a sense, Borland’s sculptures offer a personification of human feeling, wrought with tension, anxiety, and pain. On the violence livestreamed across devices, and even more so, how this will affect humanity. But really, they are open to interpretation, individual to the viewer. In this sense, they are collaborative experiences: the audience becomes an active participant.
Through the lens of monstrous feminine, such as Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection from Powers of Horror, 1980, Borland’s bulbous, elastic figures evoke the unstable boundaries between self and other, attraction and repulsion. By wrapping, binding, and reconfiguring form, the body is never rendered neutral but is continually inscribed by gendered and cultural expectations.
Slit, 2025, work in progress, digital renders
Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney/Melbourne
The swollen and twisted figures vividly expose the limits of the body and identity, hovering between attraction and disgust, humour and horror. The fleshy folds and disfigured skins suggest a friction between what is human and what is other, pulling viewers into the uncomfortable space where beauty, gender, and selfhood unravel.
Borland’s ever-evolving art practice has always asked this of her viewers: To consider a different reading that challenges contemporary media. From photography to sculpture, from models to her own body. The artist’s exploration of the human form extends into three-dimensional space, where ideas of flesh, distortion, and identity take on visceral immediacy.
From a previous show: Morph 30, 2018, archival pigment print, 92 × 78.5cm, edition of 6 plus 3 artist’s proofs
Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney/Melbourne
Puffs resists the aesthetics of idealised femininity; instead, Borland presents a deliberately discomforting intimacy. The distorted, non-binary anatomies refuse categorisation, destabilising the gaze and suggesting new possibilities for embodiment beyond normative beauty and gender scripts. The body is reclaimed as a site of agency, using material play and psychological unease to expose fragile identities and to invite reflection on the ongoing negotiation between self, body, and society.
Emma-Kate Wilson is an art and design writer and editor based on Gumbaynggirr Country (Bellingen, New South Wales).
Sullivan+Strumpf
26 November to 20 December 2025
Melbourne
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, November 2025 issue, pp. 20–22
