Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

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