Words Ellie Hughes

“I never wanted what other people wanted, I always wanted kind of the opposite, maybe on purpose,” says Polly. Having grown up surrounded by animals, with an animal-obsessed father, taking up taxidermy at 23 felt natural to her. The question wasn’t, why would you want to skin an animal, she says, but “Why wouldn’t you want to?” At the time she was working at the Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms – it was where she got to know a lot of the Young British Artists, including Mat (although their relationship started much later), who were regulars at the bar. She was living in the huge upstairs flat but says, “I had no stuff to put into it, no money to decorate it. I wanted some taxidermy in there; it was a way of keeping beautiful creatures and having them around, a connection to nature.” She found a taxidermist in Edinburgh to teach her and success came very quickly. “I loved it, it’s the perfect marriage of art and science, so tactile,” she says.

Although her rapid success caused her to experience a classic case of Imposter Syndrome, she quickly earned enough to put down a deposit on her own home. Security was particularly important: her parents had divorced while she was 19 and away at university in London, leaving Polly without a family home. “I was very determined to buy my own home, it would make me feel safe,” she says. It’s the reason, too, why it took her several years to leave her own place and move into the converted south London pub that Mat had bought, and which the couple have now sold.

“Home means a lot to me, yet I can easily let it go,” says Polly, explaining that, “life is a series of letting things go, a series of little losses. You spend your life accumulating things and people and then you declutter.” Polly describes herself as a “very optimistic person”, yet the abrupt death of her sister, just a few months after her mother passed away, “changed everything”. It made her highly anxious, intolerant to the noise and crowds of the city, buses would give her panic attacks as they sped past. “I had an epiphany of how to live and that was with fewer things in the countryside.”

It has taken them “a few years of dismantling everything we’ve built up”, which at one point included a freezer full of dead snakes for Polly’s art – and which she shared on a Zoom call with her son’s Reception class, to much acclaim. The house is well known as a shoot location and viewing space - Baby Reindeer and Black Doves were both shot here. [The exclusive video tour of Polly and Mat’s remarkable house – taking in Polly’s cellar studio, a taxidermy zebra and art gifted from YBA friends, including a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet, is available for members on Patreon, priced £6 per month.]

Life in the countryside allows for creativity to spring from boredom, for the boys, now aged seven and nine, to spend more time outdoors and away from screens, getting a better understanding of the world, and for everyone to be “less stressed and more easygoing”. Ultimately, though, as Polly sums it up, “Home means family. As long as I can take those three along with me I could make a home anywhere.”

Forthcoming episodes of Homing feature Sam Taylor-Johnson, Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson and Skye McAlpine. Subscribe to Homing or become a member of Patreon and as always, happy listening.