JULIA DEVILLE

This Melbourne based, Kiwi designer creates hauntingly delicate taxidermy jewellery using small animals from mice to birds. Her mission is to express the fleeting nature of life, and to preserve something after it has deceased, in turn letting each animal to live on to create new beauty. It might sound creepy to wear the immortalisation of little kittens and deer's with jewels in their eyes, or mice and birds as broaches, but her pieces are original and beautiful. For the faint hearted the wing broaches are an easy starting point, the vivid colours, and fragility of feathers will make you feel you have a life fluttering at your breast, without the reminder of its origin. In fact, she is an animal rights activist, using only animals which have died of natural causes, and really sees her work as honouring lost life. As a gold and silversmith technician, her work is of fine quality, exhibitions in both London and Paris confirm this. But is her combination of these more traditional elements with materials that were living jet and taxidermy which give her work its special edge. DeVille is fascinated with the Victorian aesthetic to communicate mortality in the Memento Mori period of the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries, their mourning jewellery and methods to sentimentalise death with adornment. She sees her work as a reminder of our own mortality, and as a celebration of even the shortest life.

POLLY MORGAN: an accidental artist

Polly Morgan in her studio, Photography by Pal Hansen

British artist Polly Morgan, one-time Shoreditch barmaid and English literature graduate, lives and works from her in East London studio in Bethnal Green. A one-day taxidermy course on a whim was the starting point to a fully-fledged artistic career stuffing dead animals.

This is not your normal taxidermy. A lovebird looking in a mirror; a magpie with a jewel in its beak; chicks standing on a miniature coffin; a cage held aloft by vultures; and pheasant chicks suspended from balloons. It is still life art, with the animal as subject. Morgan explains that by seeing the animals out of context it encourages the viewer to look at them as if for the first time. That as we get older and jaded, because we’ve seen it all before, she aims to create a sense of magic. For Morgan, animals are like paints would be for a painter or clay for a sculptor. She wonders whether it will become more of a conventional medium. Or, on the other hand, whether she and her taxidermy are a trendy fad. But what is clear is that her work has become more experimental and she is further exploring the possibilities of the animals. Her work is becoming bigger in scale and more abstract and sculptural. She is growing confidence in her accidental profession.

She was first persuaded to show some pieces at a friend’s bar opening in 2004. Then again cajoled, she sowed at a friend's stand at the Zoo Art Fair. Her work – a rat curled in a champagne glass – was sold before the fair even opened. With some luck perhaps, this early work caught the attention of Baksy, and in 2005 he commissioned her to produce work for his annual exhibition Santa’s Ghetto. She then went on to exhibit at similarly high-profile shows, such as Jay Jopling’s White Cube. And she has collected some influential and supportive friends, Dinos Chapman and Noble & Webster, and equally influential fans, Kate Moss and Courtney Love.

Her prices now range from around £300 for a quail chick's head on a wire, to £85,000 for the large-scale Departures (the cage held aloft by vultures), which she sold to a German collector last year.

The thirty-year-old had her first solo exhibition, Psychopomps at the Haunch of Venison at the end of last year. However, she is currently showing a selection of her exquisite and dark pieces at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, in exhibition Contemporary Eye alongside such company as Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brother and Jeff Koons.

AWARE: Art Fashion Identity

This third season of contemporary art at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, examines how artists and designers explore the nature of clothing as more than just a protective, functional garment. It explores clothing as a method of communication, as a marker of identity, nationality, status and aspiration, and it touches on social and political issues such as globalisation, the environment, displacement and conflict.

The exhibition includes work by 30 leading international artists and designers, and runs in four sections. ‘Story-telling’ acknowledges the role of clothing in the representation of personal and cultural history. ‘Building’ covers the concept of clothing as a form of protection, referencing the portable nature of modern life. ‘Belonging and Confronting’ examines ideas of nationality, displacement, political and social confrontation and tensions created as new cultures and traditions fuse. The final section ‘Performance’ highlights the roles that we play in our daily life.

There is a great variety, with some exhibits successfully achieving a strong and thought-provoking message. For example Palestinian artist Sharif Waked confronts the difficulties faced by his people and the complexities of the political situation in the Middle East with his short film Chic Point (2003). He plays on the glamour of a catwalk, but each and every piece reveals flesh; cut-out tee-shirts, cropped suits to reveal the midriff, shirts un-buttoned back and front, ‘I heart New York’ with the heart cut out and shirts that can fold up like a blind. Baring flesh as a fashion statement is contrasted with images of Palestinian men being subjected to body searches. The sense of identity and dignity, and the way in which the removal of clothing can lead to the loss identity and dignity is a strong message. Film footage of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York in 1965, works with a similar theme, although with a rather different purpose. She sits motionless and expressionless, inviting the public to cut strips from her clothing. Scraps of fabric fall to the floor, and her body is revealed. It is closely in tune with the second-wave feminist movement that began in the 1960s, exploring women’s emancipation from the constraints on their identity represented by clothing.

Dai Rees’s Carapace: Triptych, the Butcher’s Window (2003) is also a successful piece. It features three leather garments hanging from meat hooks, based on 1950s dress patterns which are reassembled to look like carcasses. They invoke sides of beef painted by Rembrandt and Soutine, but they are also are surrealist objects, and are reminiscent of Francis Bacon. And Hussein Chalayan’s commission, Son of Sonzai Suru (2010), inspired by the 300 year old Japanese tradition of Bunraku puppet theatre, is also strong. A beautiful dress is surrounded by black ghostly figures. It is intended to make the viewer think about the way our ideals of beauty can be controlled by contemporary puppet-masters who control the media, and how our perception of the value of fashion is managed by its presentation. Another seminal piece is Yohji Yamamoto’s Femme Collection, Autumn/Winter 1991–92, a wooden framework moulded into the form of a dress. It clearly articulates Yamamoto’s desire to regain respect for clothing and promote women’s independence. It suggests a human skeleton, an architectural structure and armour. It recalls the constraining corsets that women used to wear but its robust appearance asserts the strength of the person that might wear it.

However, despite some wonderful individual pieces, the exhibition is not a success in total. There are too many fillers and many of the pieces didn’t deserve or need their accompanying text and interpretation. For example Susie MacMurray’s Widow (2009) is a beautiful dress, which when you look closer is made of pins and leather. This is an obvious contrast of beauty and aggression; the perhaps pretentious text assumes the viewers stupidity. And the encouraging name of the exhibition is little addressed. Helen Storey’s dissolvable dress, made of an experimental enzyme, is slowly lowered from a scaffold into water over the course of the exhibition, and disappears. Perhaps it is an anti-fashion statement, commenting on the transient nature of fashion. But what does this really tell us of relevance to identity?

But the topic, Fashion, Art, Identity, is a highly worthy one. The links between identity and fashion are of great human interest. And it is generally recognised that art and fashion are naturally moving together in many ways since the shift in both disciplines over these last decades, so it’s of importance to see an exhibition dedicated to it. Much of this exhibition is insightful and though provoking. Even with its problems it makes us think about the relationship between fashion and the dilemmas of modern society.

Susie MacMurray 'Widow' (2009)

Yohji Yamamoto Femme Collection, A/W 1991-92

Hussein Chalayan 'Son of Sonzai Suru' (2010)Yoko Ono 'Cut Piece'

Aware: Art Fashion Identity. Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Starts 2 December 2010 until 30 January 2011

Contact: 0844 209 0051 or www.royalacademy.org.uk