Palm Shadows

Polly Pollet – Palm Shadows

Oever Gallery, Ostend – Solo Exhibition

Dates: July 12, 2025 - August 24, 2025

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How do we remember? And can we ever trust what we recall?

In Palm Shadows, Belgian artist Polly Pollet unfolds a series of works that navigate the fragile terrain between recollection and reinvention. The exhibition opens at Oever Gallery in Ostend, a coastal city woven into the artist’s own family history—marking a return not only to a geographical place, but to a lineage, a rhythm, a cycle. What emerges is not simply a memoir of Colombia, where much of this work was conceived, but a universal reflection on memory’s fluid nature—how it is shaped, distorted, and sustained by emotion, time, and longing.

Drawn in ballpoint pen, every image in Palm Shadows is an act of commitment. With no possibility of erasure, each mark is a trace of memory made visible—intimate yet unreliable, precise yet mutable. Through this medium, Pollet reimagines the landscapes of Colombia: its exuberant flora, its sun-streaked shadows, its spectral ruins. Inspired by the language of magical realism—so present in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez—these drawings are portals into a world where beauty and violence co-exist, where myth and lived experience blur.

Colombia’s history pulses beneath the surface. There are echoes of colonial occupation, of corporate extraction and the environmental violence it entails. A country of staggering biodiversity, Colombia has long been at the mercy of external forces—armed conflict, drug cartels, geopolitical interests—that have both scarred and shaped its cultural and ecological identity. Pollet’s work neither shies away from this complexity nor succumbs to it. Instead, she invites us to witness how memory weaves together contradiction: joy with grief, resistance with surrender, the lush with the broken.

And yet, this is not a lament. Palm Shadows is also an ode—to life, to music, to the emotional fullness of place. The drawings are steeped in rhythm, echoing the sounds that once surrounded them: salsa, cumbia, champeta, tamboritos—music that resists silence, that insists on joy even in the face of fragility. In Pollet’s visual world, music is memory’s twin, the invisible architecture that sustains what words and images cannot hold.

Her process extends beyond drawing. Working through écriture automatique, she writes as she draws—intuitively, without correction, allowing mistakes to become meaning. The result is a body of work that feels alive, like something breathing. Something remembering.

Ultimately, Palm Shadows transcends biography. It offers a space for shared inquiry: How do we relate to our own memories? Can they be trusted, or are they already altered by our emotions, our fears, our hopes? Does a memory begin to live its own life, separate from what once was? And in that transformation—does it become more true, or more fictional?

On the Belgian coastline, where sea and sky rewrite themselves each hour, Palm Shadows asks us to sit with these questions. To listen, to look, and perhaps to remember differently.

_______ Palm Shadows – Polly Pollet

Oever Gallery Hendrik Baelskaai 25/001

8400 Oostende, Belgium

July 12 – August 24, 2025

Vernissage July 12 | 4 PM - 8 PM > You're invited!

Visit us every Friday, Saturday & Sunday | 1 PM - 6 PM

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