My Walk, Image Courtesy of Polly Bennett.
POLLY BENNETT
Polly Bennett is a landscape artist interested in “portraying the land, with the land”. She is an Honorary Freeman of The Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers, exploring traditional craftsmanship and alchemical processes, and also a member of the Wilderness Art Collective, a group of creatives whose work discusses the natural world.
From a young age, she has been a collector of found objects and this progressed into seeking a way to reuse, repurpose and recycle her finds in an artistic context. As a result of this, she not only looks for mineral and botanical pigments but regularly visits her 'local refuse', the Thames foreshore, to collect historical waste that creates an array of colours, this includes: bone, industrial waste, shells, plastic and rusty metal.
Celebrating and honouring our world, Polly aims to cut out all synthetic pigments from her practice - decreasing her involvement in the carbon footprint of paint manufacturing - and to celebrate this she also sells the pigment she extracts via POLBEN's Pigment.
She mixes her own colours from pigments she has collected around the world - although, with a particular interest in pigments in her locality, Britain - and slowly but surely, her pigment collection is growing. She also uses plant and organic matter to produce water-based inks, and experiments with various additives to create a range of shades from single colours.
Bone Black, Image Courtesy of Polly Bennett.