Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
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Fall into Focus program / NOVEMBER <strong>2023</strong><br />
Polly Bennett<br />
UK<br />
www.pollydbennett.co.uk<br />
About<br />
I come from Ireland, Scotland (where I live) and England and<br />
have been a sculptor since discovering this to be my home in<br />
Art college in 1989. I also draw and paint.<br />
I am an instinctual and experimental artist. The study of the<br />
natural world underpins all my work. I distil unconscious<br />
thought, blending dreams with substance. Working the seam<br />
where magic collides with the visible world, I explore the<br />
intensity and fragility of experience. This is the space where<br />
corporeality and spirit merge into something unknown but<br />
remembered. I work in the borderland between conscious<br />
and unconscious, between human and the other inhabitants<br />
of this world.<br />
As an artist I want to provide food for thought and feeling.<br />
Gathering from Darkness<br />
I used my time at <strong>Arteles</strong> for development and resource<br />
building, moving forward into more solid practice. My<br />
process of going out to draw in the local area was a way of<br />
absorbing the felt and visual experience of being at <strong>Arteles</strong><br />
in snowy November. I had made 3 sketchbooks to work in<br />
and used pen, charcoal and chalk pastel, some watercolour.<br />
Sauna and snow brought an immediacy to presence in<br />
the landscape. Meditation and quiet threw me deeply into<br />
instinctive process. I cast a small area of snow with plaster<br />
in the <strong>Arteles</strong> grounds and found myself beginning to make<br />
sculpture using resources from the studio cupboards. The<br />
experience of being with other artists and writers was one<br />
of an openness to languages of creative depth between<br />
us. With discussions of ways of working, a film discussion,<br />
a salon to bring inspirations forward and other encounters<br />
all of this helped me to reaffirm myself as artist with wide<br />
ranging knowledges and curiosities. Important links were<br />
built with other practitioners and it was so supporting to be<br />
in a space where it was understood that each of us had a<br />
practice and expertise. There are ways in which this fall into<br />
focus residency softened and healed what was unknown and<br />
brought to the surface a deep confidence about my path. I will<br />
use these resources in the coming year and further to build<br />
into my long term work of making sculptures and drawings. I<br />
am so thankful for this experience.