Lisa Holden

Lisa Holden, Digital photography, Fine art photography, Photography, Self portrait, Photography women, Portrait photography

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One of the main themes in Lisa Holden’s digital photoworks is identity. Growing up in the North of England as an adopted child (her birth parents are South African and Austrian) she always felt out of place. Holden often describes herself as a square peg in a round hole – knowing very little about her birth family and roots left her with many unanswered questions. Much of Lisa Holden’s work is about bringing very different aspects into alignment. Feelings of fragmentation become feelings of wholeness, for example. Her explorations of identity began by looking at the face as a mask – a surface that can be changed and adapted at will. In the last six years, her interpretations of the self, and identity, as malleable and ever changing, have become anchored in a blend of imagery from classical art, early photography and consumer culture. And her compositions have gone from focusing on heavily pixilated close ups of the face to group compositions, to figures placed within landscape settings. Combining very different types of imagery, as well as analogue and digital techniques, Holden attempts to unite personal and group history, the body and nature, knowing and unknowing. Without any knowledge of your personal history, it is very hard to exist in the present and envisage a future. Her works challenge viewers with a barrage of questions. Is some kind of memory imprinted in our DNA? Are our bodies roadmaps of where we came from and where we are going? And how do we reach that knowledge? Holden’s compositions create a place, a home, for an identity, a knowledge, that, for whatever reason, has no firm embedding in a particular cultural or personal world. By employing historical imagery, familiar – some of which are intentionally clichéd images – images that are engrained in western cultural heritage and western visual memory, she shows how a ‘family tree’ or family history can be created. She writes the script, inserting herself into the scene. However, only using her image/figure to depict a kind of emptiness, an Everyman; the works don’t address Holden’s specific personal narrative. Her theme is identity – the materialization of identity, the layers of identity, identity and memory, but she emphasizes that by identity, she is not focused on her personal identity – she is more concerned with universals. More about how we perceive ourselves and others, and our sense of selfhood in a society where many people are divorced from their personal and cultural backgrounds for various reasons and how ultimately, we relate to and connect with each other. The compositions themselves are built up out of multiple layers, building in ambiguity; which in turn creates a space into which the viewer can insert his or herself and his/her own narrative. The works also articulate a triumph: reclaiming or reshaping personal identity and reinvesting it with power. Holden’s compositions also act as psychological spaces, as doorways for reflection. In this sense, they link past and present, hinting at possible futures. These mythological spaces often reference periods within the art genre notably the Pre-Raphaelite Period and artists such as Klimt, and Scheile. Each piece is completed over a period of months, sometimes even years. The image-making process is intuitive and painstaking; a great deal of work is discarded as she constantly tries to clarify the composition, with work that has to be meaningful, each successive piece more fluent than the one before. Limited copies of Holden's latest artist book, The Bronze Room, are still available.

events

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2010 ‘I Won’t Be Your Mirror’ Exhibition dates 12th November 2010 – 8th January 2010 Gallery hours 11- 6 Tuesday through Saturday Private View 10th November 6.30pm Diemar/Noble Photography is located at 66/67 Wells Street, London W1P 3PY Telephone 00 44 207 636 5375 www.diemarnoble.com For further information, images and interviews please contact : Press@diemarnoble.com ART FAIRS watch this space...

about

Here's the latest review on AIPAD NY 2009 by Ellen-K Sylverstad of Ellen-K Fine Art Photography: Contemporary Works/Vintage Works Ltd chose the British born, Dutch based multi talented and very charming Lisa Holden as their representative for the INNOVATION exhibition. I have no problems in understanding why. Her images are truly breathtaking. In her work, Holden integrates performance art, painting and drawing, lyrics, photography and video, and the digital manipulation of these combinations of art forms. http://www.ellen-k.no/?p=160#more-160 Holden billboards pixellation of her edges and other digital artifacts, which contrast sharply with the layers of paint she's applied, in her succession of layered rephotographing to achieve her final result. Thus, she celebrates the artificiality of the digital medium as the new techno-brushstroke. It seems an obvious development, but it took creative courage to bring it off, given the prevailing Photoshop ideology of concealing the process and imitating analogue film, if not 'reality'. Joel Simpson, Artshub, 2008 European artist Lisa Holden's work has been compared to that of such innovative and influential artists as Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist and Tracey Moffat. But Holden's imagery stands apart with her interest in themes of identity and gender combined with fantasy and art historical precedents, as well as for her unique process that merges photography with painting and sometimes installation and performance art. The aesthetic effect of her process, which involves digital imagery and manipulation, hand-painted imagery, and re-photography, is perhaps initially the most recognizable hallmark of her work. The brilliantly artificial tonality and the pixelated “imperfections” in the final work coalesce with the unmistakably feminine and feminist subject matter to create art that is visually and conceptually complex yet also instantly appealing and recognizable thanks to references to Western culture as well as elements of contemporary design and consumerism. N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Focus, 2007 Despite the ultramodern mix of media, Holden's works are deeply rooted in art history. She layers content just like she layers colours, playing with codes and clichés from our collective memory. In recent years, she has found her interest in dramatic stagings and female bodies anticipated in 19th century paintings. (...) This fascination is reflected in her choice of subjects, but also in the elongated formats of some of her works, which resemble those of Edward Burne-Jones or Gustav Klimt. Another parallel is the atmosphere of sensuous lassitude that pervades many of Holden’s works – but never comes without a highly contemporary sense of isolation and fragmentation. Her Bathsheba might be a traditional female nude in a landscape, but her face is hidden behind a field of black colour, and the landscape is fragmented and flattened. Anneke Bokern, Eyemazing, 2007 (Holden's) references have changed from Central Europe to nineteenth-century British art, particularly that of the Pre-Raphaelites, which is so well represented today in the collections of the northern cities where the artist grew up. Likewise the two panels of Untitled (Reveil) – the very use of the diptych already conjures up the formal idiom of the Pre-Raphaelites - which show a female nude on the left, emerging from a wooded scene, her head concealed by what looks like packaging, while on the right the Romantic rock formation and dripping fountain complete the picture. She does not pass unobserved, though, in this ‘natural’ setting: in the left-hand panel she is observed by a tethered goat and a vague human figure (the goatherd?) behind it, and the right-hand panel also contains a human observer, silhouetted against the tree trunk on the left. Goats, whether depicted in the act of copulating or not, traditionally connote lechery. If we add it all up – the goat, the fountain, the naked female, the voyeurs – we are presented with an erotic narrative, but a narrative that is not told (...). We construct it, like a work of bricolage, by making use of certain elements contained in the work. But it remains a tale untold. Peter Mason, essay accompanying one-person exhibition, La Sala Reservada, 2005

contact

If you would like to join my mailing list or find out more about my work, you can reach me at info@lisa-holden.com or contact one of my dealers: UNITED KINGDOM Diemar/Noble Photography, London www.diemarnoblephotography.com enquiries@diemarnoble.com USA Contemporary / Vintage Works www.contemporaryworks.net www.vintageworks.net anovak@vintageworks.net NORWAY Ellen-K Syverstad Fine Art Photography, Oslo www.ellen-k.no post@ellen-k.no THE NETHERLANDS Eduard Planting Fine Art Photographs, Amsterdam www.eduardplanting.com info@eduardplanting.com Galerie New Untitled www.galerienewuntitled.nl info@galerienewuntitled.nl

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Muse, Wild Flowers, Twilight, The Knot, Lamia (The Desert), The Lake (Lilith series), Lilith, Scarlet and Gold (Lilith series), Bathers, The Poets, Rivals, Judith (study), Liebe II (Danae series) 2007, Danae (Veil), Three Sleepers, Sleeping Figures, Through the Wire,