Original artwork description:

This is Polly. Polly comes to sit for me every day between 10 am and 1 pm. She’s never late. Whilst I paint her, she tells me her stories:
Polly was born in a Township on the outskirts of Cape Town. Her tiny but cosy house is made out of corrugated iron. It’s walls papered with sheets of Campbell soup labels, recuperated from a nearby label factory. She laughs when describing her bedroom walls: « I fall asleep with Andy Warhol! »
Polly also tells me how she battled for the right to go to school. Her mother wanted her to go to work so she refused to eat and her mother eventually gave in.
Polly has travelled all over the world and her aim is to have visited 100 different places before she dies. My place was number 54…
I have painted many portraits of Polly. Inside each portrait I include parts of her stories.
In the one I have chosen to submit you can see the « Vichy » table cloth on her kitchen table, the ABC in her headscarf to symbolise her thirst to learning, her dyed orange hair.
Painted with acrylic paint, spray paint and stencils.

Materials used:

acrylic paint, spray paint, stencils

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