'They are not so much self portraits, but more imagings of experiences I’ve had.' – Holly Anderson
Holly Anderson's paintings are vignettes of sunlight - captured in swimming pools and across sunburnt bodies. Her works crystallise the brilliance of sunlight and its reflected glare using white space and cool blues - this subject matter inspired by the intense heat and atmospherics of Brisbane where she was raised and continues to live. She graduated trom Queensland College of Art (with Honours) in 2017.
Her first solo exhibition in 2018 at Outer Space, Brisbane, depicted the pleasures and fears in the sensory pleasures of the sun, a theme which continues to drive her practice. "I'm thinking about ecological anxiety, and approaches to paint that manifest the world in a more personal perceptual manner" she says. "I want to make paintings that account for this invisible alteration, objects that appear loaded with anxieties about their possible contamination, longevity or morbidity." While partial female figures often appear in the work, she says, "they are not so much self portraits, but more imagings of experiences I've had.” Her work was in the Museum of Brisbane’s City in the Sun, 2021-22 (from which it was acquired), Firstdraft Sydney's Circling the Sun, 2022 and a solo exhibition of her work was held at Innerspace Contemporary Art, 2019.
Freelance curator and writer Miranda Hine, who curated Anderson's work into an exhibition at Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane in 2017 says, "Her portraits of awkward, squashed and sunburnt bodies first drew me to her work. Each painting comes across as a really honest investigation into how to render bodily experience through the painting process, and the results range from humorous to other-worldly... In a thin, single layer of paint she is able to physically evoke the experience of squinting through a Queensland Summer”.
