Pretty Poly

My mother’s family is from the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, and as a child I made many visits to the family homestead. A particularly impactful memory is of my grandmother singing to me the dark and haunting murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” as my mother strummed the tune on her “woman-shaped” dulcimer, and my grandfather on his banjo. Storytelling, through crafts, music, and visual arts, is a rich part of my heritage that I continue to invoke as an artist using 21st century technologies. In “Pretty Poly” I have transformed the victimized Polly of yore into a Poly(math) who navigates with her dulcimer-rocket instrument through a meta landscape of multiple dimensions, where family photos become extruded monoliths — serving both as milestones and obstacles to our poly heroine’s revivification.