Polly Bennett

Polly Bennett is an environmental artist, pigment maker and alchemist exploring themes of identity
and our relationship with the natural world through colour.

Her journey into art began with a fascination for nature's textures, colours, and forms, evolving into
a practice that blends colour making, installation, storytelling, and material exploration. As a
pigment collector and maker, she founded POLBEN's Pigment in 2020, transforming raw materials
into sustainable artist's pigments and inks. She has a particular interest in the minerals and material
histories of the United Kingdom, foraging and collecting locally to uncover the colours held within
its landscapes. These colours carry the histories and geographies of their origins, reinforcing the
connection between materiality, place and meaning in her practice.

Polly collaborates with the land. The materials she uses are almost all foraged - mineral, bone,
plant, etc. - and processed by hand. She regularly travels around the UK and collects whenever she
is on the move, as well as harvesting plants from her own dye garden.

Pigment being Polly’s main voice, she often creates installations using the pigment in its rawest
form: powder. She also transforms her pigments into paints and mediums using environmentally friendly, natural, and waste materials like gum arabic, egg yolk and rabbit skin glue.

Polly’s practice is integral to her life, as her materials are all around her and she can collect them on
a dog walk, walking to the shops, swimming at the beach, etc