Artist Profile

 

Linda Holloway

Linda Holloway’s background in politics informs the content, process and material nature of her art. Her abstractions address issues relating to space and territory, but unlike minimalist abstraction the work is organic, full of overlays and shadows, searching out a visual language for intuitive knowledge and the lived experience.
‘ I see ideas and the relationships between them, more clearly than I see objects. I notice the way we interact, overlap and affect each other. How we jostle together and slip away. I like the complex interplay of intentional and random events that occur when ‘self meets other’. Paint brings its intrinsic qualities, but it has this capacity to be so much more. A painting is a little like chinese whispers:  - I think in paint - and you see what you think - and that’s the beauty of it.

In Holloway's 2007 exhibition, Unruly Spaces, the artist refers to the most unruly space of all   -  the mind.

Our attention is dynamic and emotive, coherent and elusive, slip sliding as it does between the mundane and profound. It focuses singularly and routinely, though only momentarily. The mind is where desires and anxieties interrupt unbidden, and slip away without a word .

In this work, Holloway explores making experience real through a visual language that speaks in a way that words don’t.  It is painting as an experience – a sensing of the subtlety of complexity, the lightness of calm and the weight of anxiety.

Her visual language offers a poetic intelligence of complex and sensual notation layered within a fused silky surface. There is evidence of the painter’s obsession with materiality and allusions to the traditions of abstract painting, but underpinning her process is a multiplicity of perspectives and a narrative sleight of hand.

.”  There is a truth to what we each see, feel and think, that is quite distinct to another. All of it embodies the poetic possibilities of a life.  “

Linda Holloway lives and works in Auckland.
Masters of Fine Arts  (Hons.) University of Auckland.