Polly Nor

Internet addiction is scary territory. I don’t even know how to ask about it because I have it.
Since I first had dial-up on my family computer, I’ve had a very unhealthy relationship with the internet. A lot of my work is influenced by my own unhealthy internet habit, as well as the habits of those around me. We now live in a totally hedonistic and narcissistic society, dependent on technology for our social contact, entertainment, and sexual gratification. This is something I draw a lot of material from.

Has the internet expanded the definition of art? This is an obvious yes...
Definitely. Social media, Instagram in particular, has become a really useful platform for creatives to self-publish artwork and get it seen. You no longer have to be some old rich white guy represented by a big gallery for people to see your work. Obviously, the art world still has a long way to go in terms of inclusivity, but now that anybody with an internet phone can share their work, curate their own online gallery, and develop their own following, I feel like we are seeing much more accessible and relatable art online. I love following the development of new young artists from around the world. 

Like many creative women with a platform, you get trolled online. Has this affected your perspective or given you any insight? 
Nothing seems to piss off the trolls quite like a woman with her own opinion on the internet. All of my favorite female writers and artists get loads of abuse online and, at times, it can get really personal and dark. It makes me feel pretty lucky with the small amount of trolling I receive. As shit as it must be for those women, I guess it’s also a sign of their success. At the end of the day, they are out there doing cool things and achieving their goals, while some person they don’t even know exists is sitting behind their computer screen, plotting ways to try and bring them down. It’s kind of obvious who the winner is in that situation.

The stuff I get is usually quite funny. It makes for good Twitter content, anyway. Recently, a site called Bored Panda posted an article about my work, and their readers hated it. It got ripped to shreds. I don’t think I can even call it trolling because they genuinely just really disliked my art, which is fair enough! Basically, the general consensus of their readers was that I have a personality disorder, I hate women and myself, I draw like a disturbed prisoner, and I should probably be locked up in a mental hospital. I had never really had that much negative feedback until I read the comments on that article. When my Instagram following was spiraling out of control and almost every comment was a young girl writing, “Same,” global brands like Gucci started hitting me up to work with them, which was really surreal and cool, but the pessimist inside of me couldn’t help worrying that perhaps I was becoming too mainstream. Reading those comments on Bored Panda really dragged me back down to Earth. The one I can clearly remember was somebody comparing my work to a shit on a doorstep. Something like, “If I shit in front of your doorstep, it will also generate feelings, but it won’t become art.” That one was pretty good.

The demons in your drawings seem friendly lately, like they are supporting the women they surround, holding them up. 
I don’t think of the demons in my work as an evil force like in most cultural depictions of the devil. I guess my interpretation of them comes, in part, from the saying about facing your demons. Most of my pieces are about the relationship the female character has with herself, but sometimes they are outside forces. It kind of varies from piece to piece. Sometimes the demons are destructive and menacing, but at times they’re also comforting and protective.

My work is very much influenced by how I’m feeling at the time. My best pieces came out of my last breakup a few years ago. It was a really shit time. I was broke, living at home, and couldn’t find a “real” job, so I just poured all my emotions into my art. That’s when I figured out that making new work and drawing from my own frustrations made me feel really good, kind of like therapy. So I started spending all of my spare time in my studio, and since then, I haven’t really stopped. Now that I’m in a really good, healthy relationship, I’m actually finding it more of a challenge to keep creating the same style of illustration work. I’ve got nothing to be angry about and it totally sucks, ha!

How else has your work evolved since we chatted last year?
It’s been a crazy year; pretty non-stop. I’ve been doing more illustration work and developing my online store. I’ve worked on a few animations with director Andy Baker, and I’ve been experimenting with some 3D work. I’m taking key elements from my illustrations, like the human skins and the worm-like devil arms, and making them into large-scale sculptures out of paper mache, Modroc plaster and latex. I first showed them at my solo show in London. It was the first time in ages that I worked on anything without sharing it online, so it was exciting to see people’s reactions in person for the first time.

What have been some favorite reactions to your work?
I get a few messages from girls saying that when they’re having a bad day, they look on my Instagram and it cheers them up. That’s always really nice to hear. When I have the time, I try to read all my comments. People write some funny shit on my posts. I can’t really remember any in particular apart from one I saved to my notes: “Ur art makes my heart and my brain horny for thinking.” I liked that one, and obviously the comment comparing my work to a shit on a doorstep… can’t forget that.

It seems you are celebrating expressions of lust and other feelings women have been conditioned to suppress. Is that fair to say?
Female sexuality is definitely something I like to celebrate within my work. When I was growing up, I went to a school called Acland Burghley in North West London. In most ways, it was a great school. It had a really good art department and I made most of my best friends there, but it was the only mixed school in a neighborhood of loads of girls schools, so it meant that girls were massively outnumbered by boys. In my class, there were only, like, 5 girls in a class of around 30, and they created a very patriarchal and, at times, predatory environment. Even when we were only 14, it seemed normal for the guys to grab your bum in the corridor, put their hands up your skirt, or grab you by the hair and force your face into their crotch. Stuff like that happened to us every day but we didn’t even think of it as abuse. Having spoken to friends from other schools, I’m told similar stories. I’m not sure if it was because were the first generation to have open access to internet porn, or because nobody spoke about consent back then (sex education was pretty much just your teacher putting a condom on a banana). But, either way, sex was thought of as something that guys were totally in control of. If a girl wasn’t up for it, she was frigid, but if she was, she was a slut. It was a lose-lose situation.

I think we’ve definitely been conditioned to feel ashamed of our sexuality and our own desires. Even now, as an adult, I still have my girlfriends messaging me having woken up next to some guy after a drunken night out and feeling ashamed and embarrassed about it all week. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of my male friends feeling guilty about getting laid.

It seems the scenery has fallen away in your drawings, and you’re focusing more on the relationships between the women and their demons. 
I go through phases with my work. I started out mainly drawing my characters in their bedrooms. I really enjoyed thinking about what each character would have in her room and drawing it all out with lots of really intricate detail. I found it really satisfying. Those bedroom scene illustrations are probably still my most popular pieces; they’re the most relatable. I like including all the really basic stuff that we all had in our childhood bedrooms—posters, pin boards, Ikea lamps and the crappy pop-up wash baskets. But, last year, thanks to Instagram’s algorithms, I kept coming across other artists’ work that looked really similar. I guess that naturally happens with art, just like any other cultural trend, but it made me want to move away from the bedroom scenes for a bit. I started switching up my color palette, and I got into drawing the more surreal forest scenes. I still revisit the bedroom scenes here and there, but I think it was important for me to push myself out of that comfort zone and start moving down a more abstract path.

Tell me about your relationship to Quasimoto and other influential music that creeps into your work. 
I’m a big fan of Quasimoto. I actually had such a fangirl moment last year when Jeff Jank (Art director for Stones Throw Records, creator of the Madlib, Doom, and J Dilla artwork, and illustrator of Quasimoto) hit me up and drew Quas into one of my pieces. That’s still probably one of the highlights of my career.

The music I listen to definitely creeps its way into my work. I’m a real creature of habit, so when I get into a song or an album, I have to keep playing it on repeat until I’m sick of it. When I look back at particular pieces, I can remember exactly what I was listening to at the time. Growing up, I really only listened to hip hop, but now that I’m working in a shared studio, I’m trying to listen to more chill stuff that isn’t going to piss off the people around me. At the moment, I’m listening to a lot of Homeshake, Kraughbin and Charlotte Day Wilson. I also listen to the Oldboy soundtrack every day when I really need to get shit done fast. (The original Korean Oldboy, by the way, not the American version. I don’t know what music Spike Lee chose to put in that totally pointless remake of an already perfect film.)

What did you draw as a kid?
When I was really young, I liked drawing theme parks, sea horses, jelly fish, snails and snakes, but I always mainly drew girls. I used to draw them all over my school books and paint them on my bedroom walls. Naturally, the style of the characters has progressed and changed over the years, but they have definitely stuck.