Polly Gould

Different Paths from Sky to Ground: The Sea Stories
16 April to 24 November 2024
Different Paths from Sky to Ground explores the water cycle and the patterns of connections between falling snow on glaciers of the Alps to the waters of Venice: its drinking water and its lagoon. The crystalline form of ice and the geometries of the historic and now redundant rainwater cisterns in the city's squares provide the shapes of the sculptural works. formed by glass seed beads - conterie - threaded on wires. The title phrase Different Paths from Sky to Ground is taken from the explanation of why each snowflake is different from every other: It is the pathway of the fall of the developing snow crystal that influences the variation in form, yet every snow crystal is structured as a hexagon due to the crystallization of water molecules. Ruskin's image of the sea of ice is here remade as an anaglyphic giclée print. Two stretched overlapping perspectives are separated into red and cyan and appears three dimensional when viewed with bi-colour lenses. The same image is printed as a Risograph multiple in two tone acqua and orange on Alga Carta paper, an historic ecological paper first developed in the 1990s that is manufactured from the excessively proliferating algae from the Venice Lagoon.

Polly Gould works across media in which storytelling plays a strong part, either with performances that narrate the artworks in some way, or in the fictions and histories that inform the works. These might be sculptures in glass or fabric, sound or video works, installation pieces, drawing, watercolour, found objects or pin-boards. With an interest in collections and archives Gould has shown work in places such as the British Library, London, and Botanic Gardens in Cambridge and Sydney, and in natural history museums in Bergen, Norway and Maastricht, Netherlands, as well as showing in galleries internationally. Gould was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2007. She has a short-story in a collection of fiction by contemporary visual artists in Britain, 2006. Polly Gould studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and has undertaken both Fine Art and Theory residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Netherlands. She has recently completed a PhD in Art and Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and is currently post-doctoral research fellow in design-led architectural research with ARC Architectural Research Collaborative, Newcastle University, UK.
The works in No More Elsewhere present a series of interpretations derived from the encounter with the continent of Antarctica through the watercolours, drawings and writings of explorer, Edward Wilson (1872-1912). Wilson was one of the fated members of the Scott party who died on their return from their failed quest to be first to the South Pole. The freezing conditions of Antarctica make painting watercolours challenging, with even one's own breath coating the paper with a layer of ice1. In works using pencil drawing, watercolour on paper and painting on sand-blasted glass, free-blown and moulded glass, and the light of a magic lantern, Gould explores some of the paradox of attempting to use watercolour in a sub-zero conditions and the challenge of representing this frozen continent.