‘L’illa’ centers on the small Spanish island, Mallorca where Beatriz Polo grew up. On first glance, the work is very much about the island- its landscapes and its residents. On a deeper level, I sense that she is taking an inventory of moments, objects, places and people from her past. I imagine her sifting through these memories in an attempt to situate herself in the present.

Immediately, I felt a quiet resonance with this project; that its luminous glow created a gentle place holder in my mind. Despite this, I put off writing about it, because strangely enough, I didn’t know what to say. I realized that it activated an emotional muscle memory that I have housed in myself for a long time. Sometimes, I feel like I have sadness wrapped into the spirals of my DNA. Some of my earliest memories are the ache of severe depression. Polo’s images convey the way that acute sadness can simultaneously sharpen and simplify the way you see the world. How it becomes tinged with an odd and wistful beauty.

In addition to the portraits and landscapes, Polo creates little still lives that focus on remnants of the physical body. These images were the hardest for me to make sense of at first, but ended up giving way to a broader understanding of the work. One image shows a small, precious nest of hair, another shows a line of baby teeth saved from childhood, another shows a red heart sinking into white melting snow. I think what Polo is doing here is cataloging the spark of life that these objects contain. And it seems to me that in each image, whether it’s of a small flame, or a ghostly piece of windswept lace, she is reaching for the same thing- to expose the flicker of being that all earthly bodies house.

Her images are undeniably exquisite, they are also stark, lonely, and oddly disjointed. More often than not, it seems as if her subjects inhabit some transitional dimension. They are frequently suspended or floating, in an ambiguous state. They appear to be at a strange intersection of vivid joy and profound pain. Are they in a moment of ecstatic, buoyant surrender, or is this the moment of floating after the exhale of a final breath? In one image, we see a woman’s feet lifting from a piece of furniture. It gives the fanciful impression of taking off in flight, however, there are also darker explanations for jumping from that ledge.

To be honest, Polo’s images take me to the few times in my life where I have teetered on the edge of a choice- to stay or to go? It’s strange how everything slows down on the seat of that precipice. Life is distilled down to a series of still images and moments to be sifted through. Test the weight of each one- in what direction does it tip the scale? Is their combined mass enough to keep a person anchored to this world? Polo’s carousel of images feel this way- like an inventory to be tallied for some grand reckoning. I float through her pictures, like some sort of spirit watching, with my bird’s eye view of her world, as she sorts.

By sharing this personal response to Polo’s work, I do not aim to project a definitive meaning onto her images that she did not intend. While I do think that ​‘L’illa’ is about exploring a psychological space that contains both light and dark elements, it may have nothing to do with depression and suicidal ideation. However, in a more general sense, I do see the ability to open-endedly invoke a powerful emotional resonance as one of the hallmarks of a good project. That no matter what it’s about, it has the capacity to pull you inward to a place of emotional muscle memory and possibly, meaningful introspection.

– Mia

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