Polly Thelwall is a British painter and sculptor whose practice centres on small-scale casting, modelling, stitching, papier-mâché, found natural objects and paint. Originally trained at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1993, she grew up on the North Coast of Northern Ireland, an environment where raw landscape and weather formed an early sensibility for the meeting point between the human body and the natural world. Alongside her sculptural work, she maintains an active practice of drawing, sketching and painting. Thelwall works intuitively and experimentally, navigating the threshold where human experience and the more-than-human world intersect. Her process invites the soft, scarred animal of the body to speak alongside the mind, often inclined to assume its own perfection. Through an internal and external alchemical process, she allows these dualities to interact, transform and reconfigure. Opening herself to the unknown, she creates conditions for unexpected forms, ideas and emotional registers to emerge. Sculpture offers her a visceral, hands-on connection to the work she is called to make. Her practice is grounded in close observation of the natural world, particularly through drawing. These studies seed both her two- and three-dimensional pieces, guiding her as she follows intuitive threads toward a cohesive whole. Each work becomes a synthesis: personal experience, an internal library of forms, and the evolving questions that shape her enquiry. Thelwall’s practice is ultimately an exploration of transformation; material, emotional and perceptual. Through making, she seeks to articulate the subtle, shifting relationship between body, landscape and imagination.