Georgina Pollard has two distinct practices that focus on the relationship between the individual and the collective. Her involvement in the arts is a broad field of social engagement that enlists curating, writing, performance, workshops, drawing and sculpture. She sees art as part of the functioning and transformation of everyday life and her socially engaged artwork involves local, slow and small scale interventions that prioritise curiosity and listening. She values artists and the art object as an active participant in community, believing that collective action requires a combination of responsibility and festivity. 

She has a 15+ year history of collaborations as an artist and in the arts sector as a founding director of INDEX art space in St Peters with her partner Alex Wisser and a founding director of Cementa Contemporary arts festival in Kandos. Georgina is also a member of Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. She also helped to contribute to the development of Wayout artspace in Kandos; an artist run initiative run by regional artists. She has worked with artists, scientists, farmers as well as her local craft, activist and ecological communities. She is of English colonial heritage, was born on Dharug land and lives and works on Dabee Wiradjuri land in central New South Wales, Australia.

Painting

Alongside a socially engaged practice, Georgina Pollard is an abstract painter whose work involves collaborating with paint. Through a direct relationship with process and materials and a practice of acceptance and deep listening, painting pushes towards the unrecognisable. Since 2011 her paintings recycled old housepaint, pouring it in drips to create a self-supporting fabric. These paintings highlight the gesture and agency of this supposedly inanimate substance. By redefining agency to include the non-human we open our connection to each other and the earth.

More recently, paint remains an active participant in the process, although the evidence of this is less obvious. How does painting change who we are? How can a deeply individual practice connect us to each other and the earth? Through a process of unknowing and acceptance, painting enables a connection to spirit that can only be recognised when her own role in the act of painting becomes unrecognisable.

making, writing, workshops

As an artist in Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation

Georgina Pollard makes artwork that respond to the contexts provided by the specific project. In this capacity she has written blog posts, devised workshops and made artworks for exhibition. Read more about these projects here