About the Artist

Penny Pollock is an encaustic artist who chose this medium to merge her history of working in fashion with textiles and shapes. She combines materials and colors to produce clothing and accessories for name-brand lines.

Her fascination with indigenous cultures led her to travel the world, collecting bits and pieces of tribal art created by the Maasai of East Africa, the Berber tribes of the Sahara, and the woven and embroidered fabrics of India and Bhutan. Her collection of exotic jewelry, artifacts, relics, and spiritual talismans are ever-present themes in her work.

Encaustic art materials are beeswax, paint pigments, and tree resin— a technique developed by the ancient Greeks. Some of these historical paintings are displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, surviving over 2,500 years. Pollock’s use of this age-old method of painting started as a fascination with the technique and quickly became a tool with which she could infuse antique book pages, dried botanicals, and fine pieces of cloth woven into her art.