Monday, 21 March 2011
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Flights of fancy dress: Polly Borland's portraits marry the infantile and the fetishistic
Nick Cave in a blue wig, from Polly Borland's latest series of work, 'Smudge'
In 1978, in Melbourne, Australia, photographer Polly Borland was at a party with a little-known band called The Birthday Party. Borland was getting a ribbing from a friend, but the band's guitarist, Nick Cave, stepped in to defend her.
So began a 30-year relationship between the pair which continues to this day. Borland lives with her husband, the director of The Road, John Hillcoat, in the same area of Brighton as Cave and his wife, the British model Susie Bick. Borland has photographed Cave numerous times, most recently for the cover of "Money and Run", Cave's forthcoming track with supergroup UNKLE. Now, there is Smudge, an exhibition and book featuring Cave posing in various infantile, adapted costumes, opening at Other Criteria, Damien Hirst's central London gallery on 18 March.
Borland meets me at the exhibition space. With her severe bob, large glasses and Australian accent she is easily recognised. She peppers her speech with an effusive laugh that punctuates periods of quieter thoughtfulness.
"Nick's kids are a year older than our son and I am good friends with his wife," she says. "We all hang out together. He asked me to do a shot for him and I asked him for a favour in return. He loved all the dressing up. I just think that he's never been interested in rules. Neither have I. Maybe it's an Australian thing. You get to a certain age and you think: who cares? We've got to enjoy ourselves."
Borland was born in Melbourne in 1958. She was given her first camera, a Nikkor, by her father when she was 16. She says she was studying at art school when she first encountered what went on to be her main influences: Diane Arbus, photojournalist Weegee, Larry Clark.
Shortly after leaving art school, Borland began working for newspapers and magazines. She moved to England in 1989.
Borland's portrait photography subtly undermines her subjects' stature. Given the rare opportunity to photograph the Queen and Gordon Brown, she took their pictures against sparkly backgrounds; Peter Lilley, when there was speculation in the press about his sexuality, sat in front of a glittering backdrop. "Editorial work came easily to me, but it was always a means to an end – it consumed me, it interested me, but I still found it creatively restrictive," she says.
Her artistic work tends to marry the infantile and the fetishistic. In one photographic series, 2001's The Babies, Borland explores the world of infantilism in adult men who enjoy dressing up as babies. In 2008's Bunny, produced with a tall, blonde Brighton actress-turned-model called Gwen, there is equally something stunning yet sinister: in one picture, Gwen is pictured topless, bent in half, wearing what are apparently a pair of stuffed tights which are made to resemble bunny ears (curiously, when discussing her relationship with Gwen now, Borland falls silent). "Much of my work is about love," she says. "I know that sounds naive, but it is about my relationship with people and their ability to trust me. I don't feel like I am manipulating people." She says with the adult baby work she felt like a mother figure. "The common link was that they all felt unloved as kids. I actually felt the whole thing wasn't that psychologically interesting. That's how it resonated with me. That's how they chose to rationalise it. I am a voyeur; at the same time I am willing to get stuck in too." She says she also modelled in the Bunny series, and that you can see her "if you look hard enough".
The new work – various models wearing all-in-one body stockings decorated with cheap fancy dress, their faces concealed with masks – is as much about Borland's relationship with her subjects as it is about imagery.
It all started, she says, when Hillcoat was shooting The Road in Pittsburgh. Borland was left to home-school their young son, and began shooting him and one of his schoolfriends in various costumes. She said she could not stray into the "areas she normally explores" – namely, nudity, and how it interacts with childlike behaviour.
Returning to Brighton, Borland decided to spend longer on the project. She roped in Cave, local photographer Mark Vessey and Sherald Lamden, who was then creative director of Alexander McQueen's contemporary line, McQ. "So it was that I went around to her house in Brighton," writes Cave in the introduction to Smudge's accompanying book. "We played dress up." According to him, Borland squeezed him into everything from body-stockings to rubber bathing caps and crotch-accentuating leotards.
"I thought I would marry the photos of Mark and Nick, which I did separately," she says. "I started with conventional costumes, but I felt that was a bit limited so I started developing my own costumes. Very basic. I used little bits of costume with body stockings and leotards and tights and pantyhose." She says "the ambience is different" with the different models; in many photographs, figure-hugging lycra make the models' identities unmistakeable; in others, through the use of cartoon-like costumes, male and female elide.
Despite Borland's protestations that her portraiture doesn't "stretch her", she has little idea why she is drawn to society's extremes.
"I think that anyone who is working creatively is a bit like litmus paper," she concludes. "I soak up a lot of stuff. I am hyper-sensitive and along the way I lead quite a conventional life. Maybe I am not acting out that stuff because it's in my work. It comes from existential angst. I think life's difficult."
Twenty prints from 'Smudge' will be on display and for sale at Other Criteria Gallery, New Bond St, London W1 (www.othercriteria.com) to 7 April. The accompanying book is published by Actar (£19.90)
Rob Sharp @'The Independent'
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Fear on methadone doctor shortage
THE number of Victorians dying from drug overdoses or suicide will rise if more doctors are not recruited to treat heroin addicts and tackle a crisis in the state's methadone prescribing service, drug experts warn.
An audit of the system found the number of people receiving methadone and buprenorphine has risen by 15 per cent to more than 13,000 in the past four years. In the period, the number of GPs prescribing the opiate-based heroin replacement drugs fell by the same percentage, to only 400, or about one in 10 GPs.
People in rural areas face the biggest challenge, as an estimated 20 doctors, mostly in inner Melbourne, look after 80 per cent of pharmacotherapy patients.
The Victorian Auditor-General's report, released this month, has renewed fears that patients trying to kick heroin will find it difficult to get help.
David Nolte, a pharmacist who dispenses methadone to about 100 people at his Carlton North pharmacy, said the shortage of doctors and pharmacists willing to treat drug-dependent patients was ''outrageous''.
''If people can't get to see a pharmacotherapy or a drug and alcohol doctor there is a time where they're hot to trot and they want to start on a program. If you miss that opportunity you lose it altogether and people can go back to drug-using, they can overdose or commit suicide,'' he said.
Doctors are more reluctant to take on patients with drug problems, with the Auditor-General's report showing that last year only 24 GPs carried out the training required to prescribe methadone. The state government's target was 70.
Associate Professor Paul Dietze, head of the Burnet Institute's alcohol and other drug research group, said a properly funded and managed pharmacotherapy system was cost-effective.
''It really does save the community a lot of money and a lot of heartache,'' he said. ''It fundamentally alters the way in which illicit drug markets operate and because there's going to be much less demand for drugs, there's much less crime associated with drug use.''
State government reviews of the pharmacotherapy system in 1993, 2003 and last year all recommended an overhaul of services, but the Auditor-General found little progress had been made.
Professor Dietze said the system had been heading towards crisis for several years.
''The prescribers are getting older and some of them are nearing retirement age and they're burdened with what seems to be an extraordinarily large number of clients, so we need to be responding effectively now,'' he said.
Damon Brogan, executive officer of Harm Reduction Victoria, a group supporting illicit drug users, said the worst shortages were in regional and urban growth areas, where one GP could look after up to 500 drug-dependent patients.
''If these patients aren't able to have their prescriptions and their dispensing maintained, they're going to get very, very sick. They might go back to heroin or mix other drugs with alcohol, so there would be the increased potential for both suicide and poly-drug overdose,'' Mr Brogan said.
Harry Hemley, president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association, a GP in Northcote, believed many doctors were reluctant to prescribe methadone because drug-dependent patients could be disruptive and aggressive.
Professor Dietze called for New South Wales-style public clinics where patients could access methadone for up to a year. Once stabilised, they are seen by GPs privately.
A spokeswoman for Mary Wooldridge, the minister responsible for drug and alcohol policy, said the Coalition's drug strategy would improve access to pharmacotherapy but gave no detail on how this would be achieved.
Jill Stark @'The Age'
An audit of the system found the number of people receiving methadone and buprenorphine has risen by 15 per cent to more than 13,000 in the past four years. In the period, the number of GPs prescribing the opiate-based heroin replacement drugs fell by the same percentage, to only 400, or about one in 10 GPs.
People in rural areas face the biggest challenge, as an estimated 20 doctors, mostly in inner Melbourne, look after 80 per cent of pharmacotherapy patients.
The Victorian Auditor-General's report, released this month, has renewed fears that patients trying to kick heroin will find it difficult to get help.
David Nolte, a pharmacist who dispenses methadone to about 100 people at his Carlton North pharmacy, said the shortage of doctors and pharmacists willing to treat drug-dependent patients was ''outrageous''.
''If people can't get to see a pharmacotherapy or a drug and alcohol doctor there is a time where they're hot to trot and they want to start on a program. If you miss that opportunity you lose it altogether and people can go back to drug-using, they can overdose or commit suicide,'' he said.
Doctors are more reluctant to take on patients with drug problems, with the Auditor-General's report showing that last year only 24 GPs carried out the training required to prescribe methadone. The state government's target was 70.
Associate Professor Paul Dietze, head of the Burnet Institute's alcohol and other drug research group, said a properly funded and managed pharmacotherapy system was cost-effective.
''It really does save the community a lot of money and a lot of heartache,'' he said. ''It fundamentally alters the way in which illicit drug markets operate and because there's going to be much less demand for drugs, there's much less crime associated with drug use.''
State government reviews of the pharmacotherapy system in 1993, 2003 and last year all recommended an overhaul of services, but the Auditor-General found little progress had been made.
Professor Dietze said the system had been heading towards crisis for several years.
''The prescribers are getting older and some of them are nearing retirement age and they're burdened with what seems to be an extraordinarily large number of clients, so we need to be responding effectively now,'' he said.
Damon Brogan, executive officer of Harm Reduction Victoria, a group supporting illicit drug users, said the worst shortages were in regional and urban growth areas, where one GP could look after up to 500 drug-dependent patients.
''If these patients aren't able to have their prescriptions and their dispensing maintained, they're going to get very, very sick. They might go back to heroin or mix other drugs with alcohol, so there would be the increased potential for both suicide and poly-drug overdose,'' Mr Brogan said.
Harry Hemley, president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association, a GP in Northcote, believed many doctors were reluctant to prescribe methadone because drug-dependent patients could be disruptive and aggressive.
Professor Dietze called for New South Wales-style public clinics where patients could access methadone for up to a year. Once stabilised, they are seen by GPs privately.
A spokeswoman for Mary Wooldridge, the minister responsible for drug and alcohol policy, said the Coalition's drug strategy would improve access to pharmacotherapy but gave no detail on how this would be achieved.
Jill Stark @'The Age'
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