Polly Borland is an internationally recognised artist exhibiting since the late 1980s. Continuing to develop photographic practice, she has transformed works and images into soft and hard sculptures. P. Borland has taken her career from minimalist and witty portraits of celebrities, such as Queen Elizabeth II, into a new realm of abstraction of the body and flesh, creating often confounding images that compel continued looking.
P. Borland graduated with a Diploma of Photography from Prahran College in 1983 and immediately held her first solo exhibition Polly Borland (1984) at George Paton Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Her career as a photographer flourished; in the following years her work was published in Vogue Australia several times and she was offered many opportunities to exhibit.
Since 2005 P. Borland has focused on conceptual and surreal photography, with the distinctive use of stockings, synthetic stuffing and props to morph human bodies into unique, strangely bulging forms. In her exhibition Nudie and Blobs (2023) at STATION, Melbourne, P. Borland used her own body to extend her photography as a sculptural practice, squishing and manipulating her flesh into the frame of an iPhone camera to highlight the abstraction and sculptural tendencies of body and skin. These photographs are accompanied by two resin sculptures that resemble previous soft sculptures P. Borland created for her series Morph (2018). In these works, the artist photographed subjects inside fabric and then over-stuffed them to create surreal human-like bulging characters. The life-sized sculptures bring an exciting new tangibility to her photographic work.

P. Borland’s work is strikingly sensual in the visual pleasure it offers. The juxtaposition of colours, textures and compositional elements, all tend towards a formal balance, while at the same time evoking the raw and darker elements of human flesh and embodied subjectivity. By adopting a classical portraiture angle of straight-on bodies, intertwined with the surreal elements of the additive objects, the photograph titled XXXII (2010), from her series Smudge, has a particular strength in this sense, as do the other photographs in the series.

In 1989 P. Borland moved to the United Kingdom to further develop as an artist, in 2011 relocating to Los Angeles where she currently lives and works. In the early 2000s she exhibited her portraits worldwide, from London to New Zealand and back to Melbourne. In 2002 she held seven group exhibitions and one solo exhibition, including the celebrated solo show The Babies (2002) at Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne, and one of her many collaborative projects with long-time friend Nick Cave, Nick Cave: The Good Son (2002) at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.