Polly Bennett, Artist in Residence

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 Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers, and also a member of the Wilderness Art Collective, a group of creatives whose work discusses the natural world.

Polly 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, Polly 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.

As part of her residency, Polly intends to make a series of stretched canvases made up of dyed pieces of canvas sewn together. The separate canvas pieces will be dyed, stained and painted with natural material found in the garden and woodland at Boldshaves. This will include plants, earth, and bone. All the natural matter used to dye, stain and paint will also be made into pigment or ink to create a limited edition set of artist pigments and inks for the Festival. These will be sold at the Festival under her brand POLBEN’s Pigment, and will be used by participants on her Pigment Making Workshop.