Polly Bennett (b. 1996) graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2018 and in 2019 completed The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers Decorative Surfaces Fellowship. Subsequently, she is an Honorary Freeman of the Painter-Stainers, and also a member of the Wilderness Art Collective, a group of creatives whose work discusses the natural world.
Bennett is a landscape artist “portraying the land, with the land” through traditional craftsmanship, using locally sourced materials in a process likened to alchemy. Combining a museological approach to materials with immediate observational responses, she collaborates with, and investigates the surrounding rural environment to re-visualise an experience of her own, and create one for the viewer. The concluding work recollects the explored environment as a memorialised snapshot, producing abstract and deconstructed results.
Honouring our world, Bennett is slowly cutting out all synthetic pigments from her work – decreasing her involvement in the carbon footprint of paint manufacturing – by sourcing all her own natural pigments.
Self-taught or art school?
I studied an Art Foundation and Fine Art BA at City & Guilds of London Art School, and also completed The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers Decorative Surfaces Fellowship, where I learnt many traditional, decorative techniques.
My art practice is very process-based so I am self-taught in many techniques as I love learning, experimenting, and pushing or adapting pre-existing methods. Each new project brings new skills!
If you could own one work of art, what would it be?
It’s a toss-up between going on a walk with Richard Long and experiencing him recording the walk, or Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, as it’s so huge that I could install it in public and share it with everyone!
How would you describe your style?
My practice explores the rural environments I find myself in. I would describe my style in three words: alchemical, earthy, and site-responsive. Alchemical, because I use scientific experimentation to transform and research. Earthy, because I literally use the natural world to depict the natural world, for example, I source and create my own natural pigments from collected earth. Site-responsive, because my work recollects feelings or memories of specific sites and places and uses found objects from those sites, and I also often create in-situ responses.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
Growing up in the countryside has instilled in me a strong connection to nature, so I always begin my creative process outside in the natural world. My curious inner child means that I collect everything, excited to see how either craft processes or scientific experiments can alter, dissect or evolve them. I find the materials and properties of my found objects very telling, and they lead my practice, like a collaboration. The landscape offers up what it wishes me to see and we facilitate one another in making a new creation.
Is narrative important within your work?
Narrative is imperative to my work, as I seek to express the memories of place and time. Narrative is important as it creates an emotional response of nostalgia in the viewer, which I feel, especially as a collector, is comforting and familiar.
I also look to express the happiness creativity gives me. Creativity is not simply an act, it is a state of being, where we participate in the universal stream of energy. This involvement gives me joy and subsequently, I alleviate the disconnect between myself and the natural environment.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Through my work, I am interested in artists such as Katie Paterson and Olafur Eliasson for their scientific enquiries and investigations into the environment, Richard Long for his found-object, in-situ responses, Aayan Farah for her engagement with and within the natural landscape, and Callum Ines and Alistair Mackie for their deconstruction of media.
What or who inspires your art?
Being a collector and pigment maker, I instinctively observe everything around me, which is probably why I use found natural objects so much in my practice, as they fascinate me so much. Because of this, I am inspired whenever I walk out my front door, and when I am having a down day, I visit my local park or walk along the Thames foreshore as my thoughts focus on what is right in front of me, rather than what is on my mind. The most wonderful inspiration is seeing natures patterns, in particular traces of weather.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
My ‘research lab’ or studio is currently my flat. I am very lucky to live with two fellow artists, so we discuss and support each other’s artwork regularly, and encourage one another to use the space for our creative endeavours. I also cannot wait to get back to the Thames foreshore now that COVID regulations have eased, as this is an environment of major inspiration and production for me, much like a studio!
Do you have any studio rituals?
As I currently do not have a studio, my ‘ritual’ of grinding pigments happens whenever I have spare time. Other than the physical act of grinding pigment being a calming and focusing performance that brings me closer to Earth, the spiritual tradition or ritual of grinding your pigment in a clockwise direction brings things into creation.
What are you working on currently?
My current theme explores different methods of recording what the river Thames leaves behind.
London holds so much history and the river Thames is the landmark that has stood through it all, leading to it being referred to as “liquid history”. There is evidence of humans living off the river dating back to Neolithic times – some 12,000 years ago – and it is incomprehensible to begin to imagine just how many people have subsequently engaged with the Thames.
I regularly visit the Thames foreshore and get lost down there for hours collecting almost anything, although many of the things I am drawn to, dating from the 17th Century to the Victorian era, are pieces signifying manual work, such as clay pipes or rusty manufacturing instruments, and they revive the ghost of the individual who once made or used them.
The idea of manual work is reflected in the ‘making’ that is integral to my practice, and involving these found objects in a collated fashion results in me making vessels and plaques of remembrance. These vessels are inspired by Memory Jugs, an object originating in Africa that became very popular in the Victorian era as they memorialised the dead with personal objects, and connected the dead to the afterlife by way of water.
Where can we buy your art?
For sales, you can email me directly at poldb@msn.com, or, my work is also available via the online platforms Art Reversal and Domenica Marland, or physically, at The Dirty Old Gallery in Hastings, UK.
