I am this day in receipt of a second-hand copy (I gibbed at paying over £50 for it new) of
Tumulus by the Dorset photographer John Miles, including this well-known image of Polly from about 1991-2:
![Image](http://s13.postimg.org/hlxyep75j/Spider.jpg)
Mr Miles spent a couple of years teaching art at Beaminster Secondary School, though he was long gone by the time Polly was a pupil there. His daughter is film-maker Sarah Miles whose
A Bunny Girl’s Tale and
Amaeru Fallout PJ played in. I’d assumed that she'd met Ms Miles at school or art college in Yeovil, and got to know her father through her, but in fact Polly is about ten years the junior, so that can’t have been the connection. John Miles also took the other ‘Spider’ image of Polly which circulates, as well as a couple more which are on his website and which we’ve linked to here before (
http://www.thegardenforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2011&start=45#p19313).
‘I often reference other works of art, sometimes as homage or as a fragment. In particular a wonderful drawing by the American painter Guston, of spiders and webs. I knew how to proceed when my son Edward gave me a rigid tarantula lurking in a glass case. The right figure appeared in the form of Polly Harvey, a singer, who agreed to take part’
More indications of the Dorset mafia: John Miles was recently interviewed for the independent West Dorset magazine
Marshwood another of whose columnists is Clive Stafford-Smith – Shaker Aamer’s lawyer and contributor to Polly’s edition of
Today in 2014.