About Polly Bennett: My Work
I distill unconscious thought, blending dreams with substance. Working the seam where magic collides with the visible world I explore the intensity and fragility of human experience. This is the space where corporeality and spirit blend into something unknown but remembered.
About the process
The starting point can be the feel of a material. Sometimes I begin with plasticene, or it could be wire, paper or fabric that my hands reach for first. The beginning of form coming out of nowhere, out of formlessness. From how hands feel and twist, press, squash, pull. From something as much body as mind.
Other pieces begin by thinking, or they start with a feeling, a sense, an idea; then take on their own sense of selves to become something utterly other than what some part of me expected. Nothing I make as sculpture now goes with a concrete idea from beginning to end. Sideways thoughts, caught by the focus of making, weave themselves into the pieces. Undercurrents from deepest darkest human fears and realities bubble up into the physical multidimensional act of making.
Sometimes I know what I think I have made but usually I am left with more questions, more possibilities, than answers. I want to leave all this open for the viewer to perhaps find something they recognise in a piece. I number my sculptures rather than title them as, even if I do have a sense of a name, to name a piece would be to restrict it, tie it up, reduce it into one literality. I wish to leave the space for many perspectives that I could never dream of on my own.