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Oil and acrylic on panel
60 x 50 cm
2021
Polly Townsend’s paintings draw on solitary journeys through some of the world’s most remote and hostile landscapes. Recent work is inspired by her 2023 Artist Residency in Antarctica and journeys through Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan, alongside previous residencies in Death Valley and Badlands National Parks.
Her paintings explore places vast in scale, apparently desolate and largely uninhabited, presenting a world beyond the familiar. Antarctica, once perceived as frozen, brutal and inaccessible, is now understood as central to the regulation of life on Earth. Rapid climatic change is destabilising its ice sheets, with potentially catastrophic consequences worldwide. Townsend’s paintings explore the paradoxical nature of this landscape: vast yet fragile, sublime yet threatening, beautiful yet unsettling.
Treating land almost as still life, she disembodies forms while remaining attentive to their original patterns, colours and light. Small works made on site become the basis for larger paintings developed in her London studio.
Oil and acrylic on panel
60 x 50 cm
2021
Polly Townsend’s paintings draw on solitary journeys through some of the world’s most remote and hostile landscapes. Recent work is inspired by her 2023 Artist Residency in Antarctica and journeys through Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan, alongside previous residencies in Death Valley and Badlands National Parks.
Her paintings explore places vast in scale, apparently desolate and largely uninhabited, presenting a world beyond the familiar. Antarctica, once perceived as frozen, brutal and inaccessible, is now understood as central to the regulation of life on Earth. Rapid climatic change is destabilising its ice sheets, with potentially catastrophic consequences worldwide. Townsend’s paintings explore the paradoxical nature of this landscape: vast yet fragile, sublime yet threatening, beautiful yet unsettling.
Treating land almost as still life, she disembodies forms while remaining attentive to their original patterns, colours and light. Small works made on site become the basis for larger paintings developed in her London studio.