Polly Morgan: death becomes her

When I arrive at her work-live studio space in Bethnal Green (just over the road from a tombstone carver's), Polly Morgan welcomes me in, as pale and fair as a quattrocento Madonna. Her voice is soft and kind, and she goes to the trouble of heating up some milk in a saucepan for my coffee. Only one thing is amiss: there's a lifesize coffin between us. A big dark-stained box on stilts, right beside her coffee table. It's sealed up but scores of starving chicks are poking their heads through the cracks, mouths agape. First exhibited at the group show The Age of the Marvellous at One Marylebone, Pyric Victors (2009) is only a still life, but somehow it's deafening; sucking all the energy from the room. 'More milk?' asks Polly sweetly. 'Sugar?'

She is popular among her fellow artists – you can see it from the 30th birthday presents hanging on the wall: a life study from Peter Blake; a double self-portrait, with affixed pubic hair, from Tim Noble and Sue Webster; a vile monster sketched by Dinos Chapman with 'Happy Birthday Polly' spewing from its mouth. The new decade brings new priorities – 'Babies. Marriage. Things I never thought about much before' – and she 'attacked' the angst of it all by having a party at The Club at The Ivy for 'about 100'.

She seems so normal, so open. And then you notice out of the corner of your eye the posy she has fashioned out of dead bird heads, stuck on stems. And the blackboard she has chalked up with a record of what's in her freezer (one turkey vulture, one chiffchaff, three small stoats). And the print on the wall by her boyfriend, the artist Mat Collishaw, which is a self-portrait wading through a river, catching fairies in a net. And then there's the coffin, which neither of us has mentioned yet.

She has been reworking one to order for the artist and dealer Alex Dellal, who wanted it the same, only smaller. Smaller? I ask, horrified, like a child's coffin? 'I know,' says Polly. 'When it was finished, and Alex's girlfriend saw it, she said she didn't want it in their bedroom.' Alex's girlfriend, for the record, is Charlotte Casiraghi, Princess Grace of Monaco's granddaughter. 'I thought she was quite right. It looked like a child's coffin. What am I becoming, Cruella de Vil?' She sighs. 'My mother always said I was a morbid child. But I think the fact is – this sounds pretentious, I know – that I was just an artist, though I didn't know it. I didn't come from an artistic family and I didn't know any artists so it took me a while to work out that was what I wanted to do. I think all artists are a bit morbid. All the ones I know are. They dwell on frightening subjects and that's what people want from them, isn't it?'

Polly grew up in the Cotswolds, the granddaughter of a Church of England vicar (formerly of St Margaret Lothbury, in the City) and the daughter of an impoverished gentleman farmer who bred goats, llamas and ostriches. Early memories include being dragged out in the middle of the night in her nightie, to help herd escaped goats off the road, and the sound of her mother screaming when she found 19 decapitated chicken heads in the garden the morning after a fox raid. Polly bred hamsters, which lived in the bath, or 'huge runs that my dad would knock up for them'. She has never, incidentally, worked with hamsters. 'They're too comical. How could you get poignancy out of a ball of fluff with eyes?'

She is the youngest of three sisters in a close family. A blood-red tattoo on her wrist, acquired when she was 19, reads 'for sake' – for Sophie, for Arden, for Kate, for Emily (Kate is her mother, Arden her father, Sophie and Emily her sisters). School was a girls' grammar, and then a comprehensive in Oxford, which meant a daily two-hour round trip on the school bus. 'I spent most of my teens totally knackered.' Squeamishness, in her family, was not an option: she remembers 'hanging out of the car window' while she and her mother drove the stinking corpses of goats up to the abattoir to be turned into dog food. Taxidermy is 'nothing, really, compared to that'.

Together with an assistant, Kim Wagner (whose sense of humour is 'even sicker' than her own, she says), Polly spends her days slicing open little creatures, removing the entrails, the brains and the eyes, then painting, preserving and wiring the skin. It's what she loves doing and besides, a corpse 'has to be fresh or you can't work with it. As fresh as if you were going to eat it.' Has she ever been tempted? In fact, yes, there was one evening when she was skinning a particularly charming piece of roadkill (she only ever works with animals that have died from natural or unpreventable causes) and one thing led to another. 'It was a fox from Hackney, a really nice sweet young fresh female fox, and some friends came over, and we all got drunk on red wine, and Paul, my ex-boyfriend [the artist Paul Fryer], said, "That's it, we're trying it." So we hacked a bit of the leg off and fried it up with red wine and garlic, but it wasn't very nice.' Fox hunting is, after all, the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. 'Worth trying, though.'

It took a while for her to find her niche. 'I was a joker in class, just silly, but then I started to feel I was at odds with everyone, that I must be morbid because I wasn't girlie, never wore make-up, didn't have new clothes.' She didn't much enjoy Queen Mary College, London, where she read English ('mainly post-colonial literature'). 'I just didn't fit in. I couldn't think of anything to say.' But 'it was a weird, turbulent time' because she had just suffered the bereavement of one of her best friends who died at 18 of a heroin overdose. 'Which was a shock,' she says, laconic to cover the sadness. She is now speaking very fast, very quiet. 'She died by accident, just after we'd been away on holiday to try and get her off drugs.' Did Polly see the body? 'Yes. I remember her feet coming into view first and recoiling and not being able to go up. And then seeing her face. It didn't look anything like her. It was upsetting mainly because it didn't look like her: that's not her. It's surreal. Very hard for a human being to get their head around.'

Polly doesn't go in for self-analysis, and can't see the link with her work, or doesn't want to. 'It's hard to know where some ideas come from.' Others are less mysterious. Discussing her magpie-on-the-telephone piece (For Sorrow), she tells me she used to have a phobia of telephones. 'When I was a kid – ten years old, roughly – my sister and I had a prank caller who convinced us he had our mother and had beaten her up and put a gun to her head. He said if we didn't follow his directions he would kill her. We were young and we believed him.' Polly crawled on hands and knees across the meadow to their neighbours for help; her mother was fine and the caller went to prison. 'From then onwards, every time the phone rang, it sent me into a paralysis of fear. All the friends I've had who've died, I've always been told through the telephone. It's this thing in everyone's home – or now in everyone's hand – but it's the conduit of life-changing events. I used to think, when my friend died when I was 18, if I hadn't picked up the phone, would it still have happened?'