Polly Law: Bricoleur and Mythologeinist in the Round Room

We are so very happy to welcome Polly Law to the Hudson Coffee Traders Round Room! Polly’s  beautiful, whimsical and erudite work combines odd, obscure but real words and images rife with visual/verbal puns, mythological references and some sheer leaps of fantasy. The pieces adorning the round room walls are all featured in her book, The Word Project which is happily also for sale here at the shop. Polly’s criteria for the inclusion of a word in the project is twofold: that they have to be new to her and the must stir her imagination. Oh what imagination! Polly developed her style after years of working in advertising and illustrating children’s books. She began to focus on shape, pattern and color and developed a technique using frisket and stencils. She began working on the dolls by chance with a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, an English poet, novelist and garden designer/writer of the first half of the 20th century. She applied the collage techniques and aesthetics she’d been using to the dolls but her next big leap came when she began thinking about how to articulate them.  Eschewing the usual brass brads her eyes lit upon a jar of buttons on her sewing table. She decided she would “sew” the figures together. While she does use buttons on occasion, for the smaller and more delicate pieces she hit on using wire and waxed line thread. After the first piece she was hooked and this “bricolage” style has been developing further since then. (Why call it bricolage? Bricolage is the artful use of what’s at hand and that was the perfect description of how she came to her technique.) The Word Project was born one spring day in 2002 when Polly was inspired to combine her life long love of odd, obscure and archaic words with her bricolage style. The natural evolution of this work was to publish the Word Project and lucky for us a second book is already in the works! Stop in, cool off an let your mind wander through the rich and vivid world of Polly Law!