For Holly Anderson, the swimming pool as subject matter presents the ultimate playground for paint. However, this is not a shallow endeavour. The pool provides a liquid laboratory where Anderson explores the effects of sunlight through brushstrokes, and the lack of them.
Part of an ongoing series begun in 2020, in Pool (halo) the viewer stands on the edge of a swimming pool, gazing into the iridescent depths. It's a scene which will conjure immediate associations for many Australians raised on summers splashing in backyard pools, swimming lessons in council aquatic centres and school carnivals - brilliant white light, fractured across turquoise-blue tiles. Except it's not just a scene. In Anderson's hands, the flat surface of the painting simultaneously collapses and expands the layers of space and time contained in interactions between water, light and landscape.
The role of light in image-making is an ongoing and essential question for artists working across mediums, from photography and film to sculpture and installation.
Anderson builds her paintings around areas of bright sunlight, with these appearing as voids of white primer peeking through daubs of colour. A fractured colour field is formed by the brilliant white light of the gesso voids and the broken tonal planes of the turquoise-blue tiles. The formal structure of the tiled grid, its straightforward tessellation, becomes lively under Anderson's watery lens, the geometric giving way to the organic. Pool (halo) invites us to dive through its surface, recalling that sensation where the body becomes something else under the water, moving differently,
feeling differently. Swimming dissolves our regular interfaces with the world, just as Anderson's paintings dissolve the interfaces between light, water and landscape.
The grid of the tiles, sweeping up from the base of the composition, presents a framework for optical games. Looking down into the pool, all peripheral visual context is erased - the scene stretches to the edge of the canvas like an infinity pool. The rainbow, with its clearly delineated colours and formal geometry, stands for all else, endless possibilities simultaneously deconstructed and reconstructed within the picture plane. However, suggestions of form remain, such as the inverse silhouettes of leaves on the pool floor, while symbolism quivers in the scintillating surface as a rainbow, a halo, a cross.
Rainbows are slippery arcs between reality and perception. In her choice of subject, Anderson seeks to explore paint's enigmatic ability to capture permanently a view that is permanently shifting. The artist's crystalline composition invites the viewer to dive into its sun-drenched depths, to reconsider the ways we see and feel.
The artist's crystalline composition invites the viewer to dive into its sun-drenched depths, to reconsider the ways we see and feel.
Anderson, who lives and works in Meanjin/ Brisbane, has been exhibiting regularly since graduating from Queensland College of Art with a BFA Honours in 2017. She has been a finalist in numerous awards including the Archibald Prize in 2024, Mosman Art Prize in 2024 and 2023, Brisbane Portrait Prize in 2024 and 2022 and Clayton Utz Prize in 2020, and her work is held in public, corporate and private collections nationally. She is represented by N.Smith Gallery, Warrane/Sydney.
This work is presented by N.Smith Gallery, Warrane/Sydney at Sydney Contemporary 2024.
Artwork:
Holly Anderson
Pool (halo), 2024
oil on panel
56 x 50 cm / 59 x 51.5 x 5.5 cm (framed)
