Holly Anderson is a finalist in the 2025 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW with her work I was a light across an ocean.
I was a light across an ocean was inspired by the view from Adder Rock on Minjerribah/North Stradbroke Island. There, Holly Anderson would watch the sun set over the ocean and see ‘glitter paths’, a phenomenon created by light reflecting off rippling water.
Anderson was reminded of this shimmering effect one day when looking at the striped folds of her bedsheets in her Meanjin/Brisbane apartment. ‘I saw an affinity between the ocean’s patterns and the stripy bed’s patterns and a painterly potential to collapse the two together,’ she explains. Anderson has depicted a glitter path where a body might lie along the bed, observing ‘a connection between the eye and the landscape, the body and the world’. The scene is rendered with subtle paint colours applied with a brush the exact width as the stripes themselves.
‘I wanted this work to conjure certain optical effects of a landscape through an everyday object,’ says the first-time Wynne finalist, who here explores ‘how the impression of a landscape might continue to be felt long after we’ve left it’.
Artwork:
