Cosmic Circles (ii)
Gabriella Polony Mountain's work includes four major themes. The first three themes are clearly recognizable as the Cosmos, Nature, and Figural works with the fourth theme encompassing history, philosophy, and culture. In her life as an artist, Polony Mountain worked with many different medium including mosaics, weavings, sculpture, stained glass, and repousse. Repousse, or repoussage, is a metalworking technique in which a malleable metal is shaped by hammering the reverse side of a sheet a metal. On the other side, a low relief design is revealed.
Polony Mountain depicted many scenes of the cosmos and this particular variation of "Cosmic Circles" includes large swirling and overlapping curvilinear lines that stretch from top to bottom, covering the entirety of the panel. These lines are highly gestural in form and are punctuated by Polony Mountain's small circular forms representative of planets and stars.
This panel is but one example of Polony Mountain's skill with the repousse technique and her ability to create movement within an otherwise static material.