Everything I want to be when I grow up
Polly Borland is best known for her celebrity photographs, but visitors to ‘Everything I want to be when I grow up’ are likely to be disappointed if that is what they are after. Certainly there are two portraits of Queen Elizabeth and one of Cate Blanchett, as well as many shots of Nick Cave and Guy Pearce, but that is not what the show is about. Pearce is present only on a contact sheet of shots taken during the shooting of The Proposition, and Nick Cave is thoroughly disguised across a selection of Untitled works from the ‘Smudge’ series. We know he is there because, hidden behind a blue nylon wig and bright red lipstick, he is one of the key images promoting the exhibition and this is the only one subtitled with an identifying name.
Disguise is the point, though perhaps also play, even a play with disguise and identity, which could then integrate the celebrity gestures, including the Queen’s portraits, which otherwise stand outside the titular theme (unless Borland does hanker for majesty). Blanchett bridges the gap more, because the postural contortions which make her all hands, nose and cheeks, link her to the Bunny series’ twisted bodies and pinkness, rather more than do curator Alison Kubler’s assertions that she has played a previous Elizabeth, though that also works, given she is placed alongside Elizabeth II (x 2).
This survey from the most recent twelve years of Borland’s work focuses on her fine art practice, though it depends on her documentary series ‘The Babies’, which started as a newspaper commission, for a through-line to be evident. Apart from Blanchett, whose portrait (2000) comes from Borland’s commission from