POLLY PENROSE – A BODY OF WORK
2014-05-12These Self Portraits are my body’s response to a space and its contents. They are never pre-meditated, often I’ve never seen the location before, and I never enter a space with an idea of a finished picture. The final image is entirely dictated by the location and how my body can fit within it.
It’s often a fight to ‘fit in’, to become a part of that space. The process of taking the pictures is punishing. It leaves me bruised and aching. Every picture is taken on self-timer, which makes for a repetitious, highly physical process of running between the camera and the pose, making adjustments as I go. It feels like I’m hammering my body into the landscape of the room, one picture at a time.
Although the pictures are an immediate unrehearsed response to a space, with little emotional consideration at the time of shooting, as a body of work, they have become deeply emotive for me. As well as showing the physical journey of my body over time, they also reveal an emotional one. Each picture candidly portrays a moment, like marks in the calendar of my life.
The tedious despair of temp work in the city laid bare on a boardroom table. A ball of excitement on a yellow chair on my engagement. The red fabric of grief stretched around me as I watched my husband slowly lose his mother. The overwhelming calm poise and balance of pregnancy 9 days before my first child is born and the almost sacrificial, exhausted pose two months into motherhood.
Polly Penrose
