“…whose work gushes forth from a private inexhaustible well of her own life experiences – from memories, wishes, relationships, observations, and a relentless need to master skills and make art.” 

--Marion Mullet, Fiber Arts Magazine 

Lois Polansky was most prolific in the 1970s and 80s during the Pattern & Decoration Movement.  She referred to her works as painted/collage bas relief in handmade paper.  Her focus was on the historical and organic sources of paper as a support for text, as well as it’s link to cloth.  Research guided the development of her art and produced different bodies of culturally based work.  Books, scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, screens, garments, theatrical props, and even an entire tarot deck are some of the forms that her work took:  each piece a journal of the process that produced it.  The works are formed of dyed paper pulp, embedded with real plant material and lace fragments; embellished with a variety of mixed media techniques, including embossing, etching, stamping, collage, encaustic, gouache, and gold leafing.  The emphasis is on blurring the fine line between art and life.  Polansky said, “I never can tell which flower is real and which is painted.  In truth, I can no longer remember.”

The artist loved to decode the spirit behind the colors, shapes, and patterns in the robes, masks, fans, and jewelry of different cultures.  Her work was mostly in handmade paper, and she described the process as “ritualistic, archaic, and rhythmic; it frees the imagination to create newer forms and variations.”

Polansky grew up in Flushing, Queens, earned a Master of Fine Art from Queens College and spent most of her adult life living in Long Island.  She was an adjunct professor at local colleges including, Adelphi, and was a masterful high school teacher at Townsend Harris High School in Queens.  Lois was at the forefront of the 20th Century assimilation of artists into society and a part of the progressive movement to build cooperative galleries. She fought passionately for women in the arts and tried to use her artwork to ask questions and activate. Lois was happiest in her studio “playing in the pulp” which is where she created larger than life artworks from fiber linters and found objects.  She was way ahead of her time with her sustainable sensibilities, and she was the original maker long before there was a maker movement.  She left us too early and left behind a body of work that her daughter, Debra Polansky Schor, is now the custodian of. 

“I believe that there is a cosmic energy that exists in the universe and that subtle threads or fibers link events together like the individual filaments in a sheet of paper. I believe that the whole sheet can be completed or fulfilled if we are sensitive to the delicate web of events that compose the total pattern. How much we see, hear, learn, or act upon, is proportionate to the level of intuition within each human being, if that person is an artist, papermaker, or scientist, etc. I believe that the beauty and pain of being an artist lies in the “extra nerve fibers” we seem to have been granted. What I do in my work is to explore the visual cues around me and try to create an art of connections.” —Lois Polansky