Polly Bennett
Bennett's artistic practice involves various investigations into her surrounding landscape/environment in order to re-visualise an experience of her own, and represent an experience for the viewer.
Combining her interests of museology, science, and the surroundings she finds herself in, whether that’s where she walks everyday or places she visits for the first time, she investigates the re-representation of things that are very familiar to her, along with surroundings that are still very unknown.
The natural world has always interested her, travelling a lot with her mother and this has thoroughly influenced her work. She spends a lot of her free time exploring her surroundings on walks, which she records in immediate formats like photos, sketches, maps, coordinates, rubbings etc., as she is fascinated by topography and how it differs around the world. Through these immediate responses she creates both two-dimensional and three-dimensional artwork, which tend to go through transformations, in order to trigger memories of her experiences.
Bennett's current body of work is in response to her time in Iceland, which she is translating through various vessel formations. By deconstructing representational imagery of Iceland down to the landscape’s basic elements she creates souvenir-like objects that represent Iceland through her memories of it.