Artist spotlight: Polly Townsend
This blog post focuses on the work of Polly Townsend, a painter based in London. She is one of the artists commissioned for the Culture Box Show. The post is written by Chloe but uses direct quotes from Polly throughout.
Polly is a landscape painter, her work draws “on solitary journeys through many of the most remote and hostile landscapes in the world”, presenting “a view of the world beyond the familiar, of places vast in scale, apparently desolate & mostly uninhabited”. She has painted scenes from Kashmir, the Tibetan Himalayas, Kyrgyzstan Pamirs, the Bolivian altiplano, remote Western China, Russia, and large areas of mountainous Europe. Polly has completed artist's residencies in Death Valley and The Badlands National Park, and later this year, she will be the Artist in Residence in Antarctica.
She spoke about the inspiration she draws from the dynamism and impermanence of landscape, countering the long tradition that has evoked stability and permanence in landscape painting:
“Paintings, drawings, and photographs of these regions have long perpetuated the sense of an environment of stability and permanence. But we now know the rate and scale of change, and that these images no longer sufficiently represent it. What needs to be portrayed is a new state – one of flux, impermanence, and a challenging passage of time. My paintings reflect this dynamic – the use of the blank space/void, which is very important in my work, highlights the tensions between absence and presence - intricate details and delicate features meet hard lines and graphic utilitarianism. This is analogous to cold hard environments.”
In relation to her work in Culture Box, she converted the qualitative and quantitative data relating to social isolation, responsive behaviours & activity preferences in care homes across the UK into line graphs. She used the ‘peaks and troughs’ of this data to form a mountain landscape drawing. This was then copied into a long concertina book. 29 hand-drawn copies of the book were sent back out to the care homes and the residents and carers were invited to collectively ‘colour-in’ the drawing with watercolour paint. The book aims to recognise the journey that the care home residents made together and serve as a metaphor for the ‘ups and downs’ of mental and physical health. She hopes that by using the data from this most challenging passage of COVID the book will enable moments of discovery & joy through painting and creativity.
Polly’s illustrated concertina book for the residents
The commission was inspired by something she had done before with personal data. But, she always wants to extend the idea into something with more societal relevance, and so she had been keeping an eye out for projects that would allow her to do so. When she saw the open call with Culture Box, it felt like a good fit! She was delighted to have her proposal accepted.
We asked her what inspired her about Culture Box:
“Like a lot of people, I felt powerless and unable to help during the pandemic. This project seemed to offer the chance to make a meaningful and positive contribution to an incredibly difficult passage of time. I liked the cyclical nature of taking something essentially negative and reformulating it into something positive for those most affected. It felt like a privilege.”
She spoke about the powerful links between arts and health, something that is particularly resonant in her part-time role as a painting teacher. She reflected that:
“Many of the adult students describe feeling more relaxed and less stressed after the class. I also teach children, several of whom find mainstream education challenging, some are being bullied. For them, having a place to express themselves freely, where they can use a non-verbal/non-academic/non-comparative language to get across thoughts and feelings is incredibly therapeutic. My suggestion for this project was that residents/carers freely express themselves without objectives. My grandmother had mild dementia and it was clearly frightening and confusing for her. I imagined how she might have found respite in a project like this and indeed in any art project. I sincerely hope residents find some joy in the act of freely 'wandering' with a brush to whatever forms, colours & marks rise within them.”
Polly is very excited to see how the books are used and how the residents felt whilst using them. She hopes that there will be a “sense of free expression on the pages”, as the concertina book only provided a basic framework. She has noticed that when teaching adults with dementia that “making sense of marks seems less important than the momentary joy of making them”. The concertina book is meant to document those ‘moments’, so they are not lost but rather made permeant. She reflected on the agency of the book once it is complete:
“If the book is kept as a book, then it could be considered a memory object, but the care homes have the option to remove it from the hard covers and display it, perhaps along a corridor – it could serve as a colourful journey to be traversed by residents as they make their way from place to place.”
Polly and the Culture Box team are looking forward to seeing what the residents create through their mark making and the little moments of joy produced through the process!
Contact details
email: pollyvtownsend@hotmail.com
website: www.pollytownsend.co.uk
Instagram: @polly_townsend
Facebook: @pollytownsendart