Holly Anderson's paintings are beautiful. her brushstrokes are precise, but there's no expression in their application. Only the specific relationship of one colour or texture to the next is important. Her paintings can appear to be faithful representations of the world, and, at the same time, abstract grids. They reward looking up close or from afar, as our eyes adjust to the intensity of their light. Anderson's subject is sunlight, the way it reflects off water, off landscape, off fabric, off skin, and how our eyes struggle to register and deal with it. Her paintings express an existential anxiety, both about the environment and the human body.
Anderson's String Bikini (2019) is a key work. It depicts the ribs and the spine of a skeleton, its clavicles extending beyond the top of the frame, its scapulas stretching to the ides. Rendered in orange and pink, it gives the impression of being freshly flayed, still coated in a fine layer of flesh. It's not gory, but still terrifying. Stare long enough and another image reveals itself. A dusty pink Miami sunset is painted into the lower third of the work, with palm trees shooting up from the ground, piercing the exposed ribs Whipped by wind, the trees take up a small fraction of the painting's surface. Behind the ribcage, whorls of magenta and titanium white suggest a supermova, defvine visual perception and comprchension. Laid over this imagery, six horizontal white lines with bows–suggesting tied bikini-top backstraps–cut the panel into seven slices. The scaringly white bows are not sweet. They are feminine, but like barbed. wire snagged in the spine, pricking the flesh of the painting and the viewer's corneas.
I was familiar with Anderson’s practice before encountering String Bikini, but it opened up her work for me. Her paintings of beaches, dappled pools, and languid bedrooms, which had felt like luscious scenes of leisure and warmth, now seemed sinister. Her grids stopped appearing like ripples on water or floor-tile patterns, and became more like incisions into her paintings’ surfaces and the viewer's eyes.
Anderson's 2024 exhibition The Light Inside a Grid at N.Smith Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney, featured pool scenes—wobbly grids of sparkling blue squares. At first glance, they might pass for luxury-hotel advertising, but each painting contains a troubling absence. In Pool (Bright) (2024) it appears that the artist has torn an enormous hole in the middle of the scene, exposing the white primer. The harsh luminosity of this nothing, forming a scar in the idyllic setting she conjures up–is hard to look away from. From this visual chasm, our vision starts to trace the white spiderweb that radiates out. This net appears from the gaps between tiny painted squares, which act like pixels, neurotically placed, forming an image from afar.
Close up, they are a strange cryptography–dashes of lime green, cobalt blue, and aqua form signs we can’t read. The image is seemingly animated–the water ripples and shines. Anderson seems intent on capturing the intensity of sunlight in her arcane, optical, semiotic net. Seen through the lens of String Bikini, this intense, engulfing light is not just a visual threat but could also devastate the body.
Anderson sees humans as blips in eternity. Her approach is post-humanist, but not the post-humanism of cyborgian, trans-species science fiction. She refers to philosopher Timothy Morton's notion of the hyperobject to explain her interest in the sun's harsh electromagnetic radiation. Hyperobjects are so enormous that they transcend human perceptions of time and space. Examples include Styrofoam, radioactive plutonium, and, crucially for Anderson, global warming. While not explicitly a hyperobject, the sun is a means by which we become aware of climate change. The glare in our eyes and the blisters and skin cancers that form from its touch are physical alarm bells drawing our attention to the impact human industry has had on the world. The Anthropocene is uncanny felt in these languid moments, reflecting off a pool’s surface, penetrating our skeletons as we watch the sun set over the ocean.
Anderson preoccupied with bodily sensation. Her painting Bed (2024) is 140 centimetres tall, and thin, with the proportions of a person. Raking sunlight falls across a cropped image of a double bed with luxurious blue-and-white-striped linen. The sleeper has arisen and the sheets ripple like the water in her pool paintings. When viewed up close, their dense pattern strobes–a flickering sensation like the glare of the sun. Another haunting absence projects from the painting’s centre. A ghostly figure seems to lie in the bed, its head a halo of pure white burning a hole in the pillow. This amorphous body seems to tear the bedding in half, with the stripes reaching across the ravine, trying to hold their stitching in place.
The human body is rendered insignificant in the face of immeasurably large natural phenomena. The Queensland sun is often overwhelming, capable of blinding, burning, and bewildering us. It’s an immediate, sensory, reminder of climate crisis. We felt it on our skin, in our eyes, in our lungs. Bodily autonomy is an impossibility in this epoch when we are at the whim of forces beyond our comprehension or control. Anderson's answer to this terrifying reality, her attempt to regain autonomy, is to neurotically examine the bodily limits of sight. In her paintings, bodies have evaporated into fields of negative space. As French philosopher Simone Weil might say, they have begun the process of 'decreation’.
Weil's notion of decreation is deeply Christian: an attempt to understand how God might be indifferent to us. The universe is not big enough for God and us, Weil believes God withdraws from existence so we, his creations, can come to be. She sees virtue in imitating this act, writing that we ‘should renounce being something. That is our only good.’ Yet as Anne Carson observes in her study of Weil, ‘to undo oneself one must move through self, to the very inside of its definition.’ This happens in Anderson’s paintings. The human–the artist herself–is not so much erased or rubbed out as decreated. Anderson moves through the self, the subject, to identify its limits–where it ends, physically and visually.
In Bed the subject seems to have been raptured away, perhaps having completed an act of unbecoming, leaving only a vacuum on the bedcovers. Vanished figures appear in other paintings. In Stickman (2019) a humanoid shape is outlined in the driftwood, standing on a poorly photographed beach, overexposed by three stops. The landscape sucks the human form out of itself, leaving only white space. The scene looks like The Blair Witch Project filmed on the Gold Coast, with the sun as a cosmic horror you can’t look at. For Weil, though, decreation is not so awful an experience. It is the only path to transcendence, although that path may be the exact length of a human life. Through her paintings, Anderson suggests that this environmental obliteration of the body, of the self and its image, might reveal the true strangeness of our contemporary lives, where massive forces reverberate through our being, burning through the notion of individuated selfhood.
In her 2025 show Some Things Too Bright to See, at Redland Art Gallery, Anderson’s paintings became taller and thinner, their images torn apart by blank strips of nothing. They draw from Minjerribah, a local landscape personally significant to Anderson and uniquely able to capture the optical phenomena she seeks. Passageway (2025) shows a Queensland interior. We stare out across wooden floorboards, through a decorative arch, and into a blinding crucifix of white light. Anderson’s segmented rows of brushstrokes have become almost fluorescent in isolation, with toxic greens sitting next to hot pinks. From afar they are almost merge into a wonderfully active mesh, but individually they are almost ugly. This tension and discomfort runs through the show.
In Candle (2025), another tall, thin painting, a shirt hangs loudly from a coat hanger, addressing the viewer as another subject. It glows with an incandescent warmth. Anderson’s signature white void is beginning to appear within it, as if the shirt’s core were being unpicked from inside, with brushstrokes appearing as severed threads. The tear stretches over the shirt into the wooden door behind. It's as if the body the shirt was meant to stretch over has vanished, undergone decreation, starved itself into nothingness. These planes of blankness can be troubling, but Anderson is not a nihilist, she doesn't wish for us all to disappear into the void. She probes her voids with her paintbrush as someone might poke a dead animal with a stick, curious about limits of the self and the horror of nothingness.
In her novel Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Chris Kraus likens the experience of anorexia to Weil’s philosophy of self nullification. For Kraus, anorexia is an ascetic, spiritual deprivation, an analysis of embodiment, and a politically motivating force. She writes, ‘The body is a lever for salvation’, and asks, ‘What is the right way to use it?’ For Anderson, the right way is to starve it of its corporeality, to nourish it only in light, to explore the shape of its absence. Kraus also writes, ‘Belief is a technology for softening the landscape.’ Anderson’s decreated bodies also soften their landscapes. They suggest a better kind of experience with the uncaring world, which can only be felt when we leave behind the meat of our bodies.
In her Archibald Prize-finalist work Not a Mother (2024), Anderson renders a self portrait in the same manner s she treats bodies of water. Warped tiles of colour form an impression of her face and torso, but another white void obscures her stomach. The faint suggestions of her fingers hold the void in place like an enormous egg. This work is anxious about motherhood–the impulse or ability to create. Anderson speaks about carrying around the question of whether or not she should have a child. Motherhood is a process of surrendering your bodily autonomy to another. From the ingestion of nutrients to feed an embryo to upending your own rhythms to feed, soothe, and entertain another, motherhood requires giving up your self, your body. There is, in the vein of Weil, a transcendent possibility there: the decreation of the self leads to the beautiful creation of another soul. Spending countless hours at the easel in her garage studio, Anderson recreates this act through painting. Her life is broken down into segments of time, framed by squares of paint and meticulous brushstrokes. Her torturous labour gives birth to beguiling paintings that contain the boundless sensation of landscape and the scale of the cosmos, Sunsets, horizons, and bedrooms hold together the infinite in a way the mind cannot.
