Saturday, September 13, 2025 at 1:00 PM to Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Wilding Cran, Los Angeles
Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Blobs and Bod, an exhibition of recent sculptural works by renowned photographer and multimedia artist Polly Borland. Known for her psychologically charged portraiture and documentary photography, Borland’s latest series marks a shift into sculptural form: one that continues her exploration of the human body as a site of discomfort, vulnerability, and transformation. The exhibition Blobs and Bod, pushes this inquiry further, presenting figures that are by turns playful, grotesque, and tender.Through uncanny figurative distortion, Blobs and Bod investigates the relationship between identity and the body, pulling it apart to reveal a current of fluidity. Working with live models, Borland uses materials such as foam, nylon, and rubber bands—compressing and distorting the human form into unfamiliar configurations. These intuitive constructions are immediately 3D scanned and cast in situ, preserved within the moment of their creation. The resulting sculptures conjure a quite literal sense of cocooning, shielding the body as it rests in a raw, unmediated state.At the heart of the exhibition stands BOD, a 7-foot aluminum creature, rendered mute, sightless, and devoid of clear agency. Balancing mass with vulnerability, BOD’s fleshy pink surface and puckered, swollen limbs, relay a sense of softness laid bare, inviting empathy amidst feelings of unease. Surrounding BOD’s monolithic form, we find a constellation of smaller, accompanying BLOB sculptures. Cast in translucent resin and ranging in scale, these beings flicker between the otherworldly and familiar. As light emanates from different angles, hints of anatomical details emerge and vanish—the shadow of an eye socket, a nose, a frozen gesture. Together suspended in a state of metamorphosis, Borland’s sculptures embrace tensions of ambiguity and objectification in an affectionate, yet wry take on the societal complexities of embodiment. Within the sculptural series of Blobs and Bod, Polly Borland challenges the seriousness with which we traditionally view the body—as a vessel of meaning, gender, identity, and performance. To be rendered as a blob is a form of liberation, where identity dissolves and sensation emerges. When exhibited together, the works on view create a quiet fellowship, a reminder that within the lumps and folds of our bodies lies something fluid and primal, unremarkably tender, and deeply communal.