Polly Hope | Quilted
Pictures, Fabric of Life & Death 8th - 25th June 2011
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The gap between Art and Life was a Pop Art target and both sides - from the
early sixties at least have increasingly sought to fill it: Conceptual, Environment and Systematic Art from one side and growing public
concern for architecture, design, popular arts and crafts from the other.
The eastern Mediterranean where Polly has her workshops, and South Asia where she has worked and from where she also garners her
inspiration, have a slimmer Art-Life gap than modern Western Europe or America. Byzantine as well as arts from South Asia, know no class
barriers, social or material and there's no cut link in the chain from luxury items - icons, mosaics, religous treasures known well to
the West - and the work of the simplest village craftsmen. Painting, metalwork, jewellery, carving, embroidery are equally Fine Art
potential and there's a live visual language still - tourist boom and post-War Western-style progress notwithstanding plus a still vigorous, if
now depleted band of popular craftsman.
Polly Hope's works are a new "Art-Life" mixture, painter with village mattress-maker, applique, embroidery, padding and
quilting, beads, sequins, coins and oddments from everyday life. They slip effortlessly from small scale to architectural environments, from
Mediaeval to wrapped Christos and Oldenburg's soft sculptures.
They are witty, fantastic, bright-coloured, serious and alive, and apt comments on customs, legends and habits of life all around
her. Polly Hope works with closely judged tones and rich-textures - patterns as her paint media - and magically transforms her surfaces to a
vision of strange private certainty, all glitter, movement and translucency, drama, light and warmth, between tapestry and painted bas-relief.
'I paint not what I'm looking for but what I've found' said Picasso and this in a different sense too is Polly Hope's mantra.
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