CHANGING TIDES
By Polly Thelwall
197 Portobello High St,
September 5th/6th and 12th/13th 10am-6pm,
Private Viewing Thursday 10th September 6-8pm, Venue 31 Artwalk 4.
Polly Thelwall is a British painter and sculptor whose practice centres on small-scale casting, modelling, stitching, papier-mâché, found natural objects and paint.
She grew up on the Atlantic North Coast of Northern Ireland, an environment where raw landscape and weather formed an early sensibility for the meeting point between the human body and the natural world. Alongside her sculptural work, she maintains an active practice of drawing, sketching and painting.
Over the last 55 years she has been growing and developing her artistic career from childhood drawing and plasticine modelling through studying sculpture at Edinburgh college of Art in the 90s, and on, now, to her current broad and mature practice.
During that time, she sketched, drew, painted and sculpted, honing her practice in the landscapes of Scotland, especially the waters of the landscape: sea, streams, lochs and rivers.
The artist was invited by the owners of 197 Portobello High Street basement to consider putting in a proposal to Artwalk Weekends. This exhibition is on the theme ‘shift and flow’.
This installation represents a first site specific sculptural work of a large piece involving many smaller elements. It is also the first time the artist has used sound she recorded as part of the work.
The basement happens to be well supplied with excellent audio equipment strengthening the collaboration between the venue owners and the artist
Thelwall works intuitively and experimentally, navigating the threshold where human experience and the more-than-human world intersect. Her process invites the soft, scarred animal of the body to speak alongside the mind, often inclined to assume its own perfection. Through an internal and external alchemical process, she allows these dualities to interact, transform and reconfigure. Opening herself to the unknown, she creates conditions for unexpected forms, ideas and emotional registers to emerge.
Thelwall’s practice is ultimately an exploration of transformation: material, emotional and perceptual. Through making, she seeks to articulate the subtle, shifting relationship between body, landscape and imagination, allowing new forms of understanding to surface.
Polly Thelwall said: “This has been an opportunity to sit with the ephemeral. Each time in rising and lower tides, the creatures will be different, the beach will be different, the specific drops of water will be different, the conditions will be different etc.”’
This Art Walk Weekend, centred around the shift and flow of the intertidal zone, comes at a moment when we have been grappling with forest fires and warming seas.
It is a time that needs space to evolve new ways like the one created by this artist who works in transformation, opening a gap for us to find our own answers.
Polly Thelwall’s relationship with the sea began as a baby living by the sea on the Atlantic coast of Northern Ireland. A childhood in and out of the water grew into a long-term love of waters and wild swimming.
The artist also volunteers in Marine conservancy, helping by cleaning oysters for repopulating the Forth and as a litter picker. As a means of exploring this passion Polly Thelwall participated in a SailBritain Sailing residency in Scotland in 2019. This led to a first cast in the landscape of a water pattern on a beach, which was later used to create part of a sculpture.