Utilising investigations and experiences of a continued interest in language, mark making and the land, this body of work considers how these three strands have intrinsic relationships with each other. Using writing and mark making interchangeably, I have initiated a consideration of the mimesis between the two, and how this vocabulary is conceived, adapted and used. Borrowing and familiarising myself with a lost topographical language and activating it from a personal relationship has produced an insistence on unravelling the bonds between the physicality of these terms and the act of mark making. I have made work generated by tracing the body language shared in these words, using muscle memory and recall to create a swinging pendulum between the terms and my own marks. Creating a lexicon of flicks, twists, turns, hesitations, pushes, drags, pauses, holds, has created a backbone for navigating my interests in the natural world and translating the sensitivity felt when experiencing a landscape. Through large scale ink paintings on silk and multi-media surface exploration, I aim to physically engage with the tactile reality of the natural world in both an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Working alongside the larger works, using my own poetry/prose has allowed me to use the back and forth between my words and marks to break down, play and expand on ideas of legibility and transcribing. Considerations regarding gathering, offering, arranging, finding kinship, adapting, borrowing, transposing, negotiating, composing have become acts of ritual that amplify intuitiveness. The work is visually reduced into simple formats which can be received in fluid environments and an engagement with repetition results in an incremental gathering of non-quantifiable data regarding human interaction with landscape. I wish to make work which sits between research enquiry, poetic sensibility and material curiosity.
Pendulum
-a seven piece silk hanging, screenprint and indian ink drawing on habotai silk, suspended from bamboo canes with hand woven twine, varying in size from 130-250 cm length and 48-90 cm width.
Earth Lexicons: Woodland, Coastal and Mountain
-screen print on fabriano paper, 76 x 56 cm
Earth Lexicon Cards
-screen print on fabriano paper, 18 x 15 cm
~a continual mark making practice~
Collaborative practice with Cerys Lloyd
permanence / translation / exchange / offerings
composing / scores — what is the core of a score?
— what is an abstraction of a score?
/ away from music; a method of translating and forming information
via: mark making / performance / painting / drawing / typing / rhythm / organisation / displacement / documentation / observation / trace / language / survey / capsules / stillness /
the performance of gathering and placing as composition, how does this relate or convey material information ?
Stave Stones | Holly Nicholls & Cerys Lloyd (above left)
&
Deconstructed Score : Call & Response | Holly Nicholls and Cerys Lloyd (above right)
abstractly / certainly / intimately
an element of being performative / orchestral / intimate / respectful within material habitat
material score, land composition, moving over the land, composing with our bodies through material habitat
going over / surveying / combing through / observing / picking up / placing / arranging
6/163 Offerings of Gratitude | Holly Nicholls & Cerys Lloyd
our and you
// from us to you
our, is we two, plus humankind >
you, is your frame and being in strength and fluidity
\\ we address you and offer gratitude for your form
taking time to describe and acquaint ourselves with each stroke of your object hood
drawings and thank yous ||
shared and said back and forth between the two of us, like the swinging pendulum of working in collaboration with each other and with you
<<written in two parts and merged as an arranged offering of thanks
acknowledging the autonomous objectivity of each of you, and our own part in the displacement of you all across a littered landscape \\
we address this space, to wherever you have moved to, either naturally or not
/ to speak into and address the space as a dancing and moving and spinning and hurtling composition
Eleven Walks | Eleven Books
-indian ink, banana paper, rice paper, 21 x 29 cm each.
Word Walks
-proposed book pages containing concrete poetry and 35mm photographs
conducting, keeping time
>>going back in to achieve balance
knowing how to be sparing / perpetual nourishment
hungry for ambiguity alongside a physical engagement with tactile reality
a haunting tension between defiant wholeness and the thinned frailty of that which is seen in part
retaining human presence
| repetition leads us to a concrete area of the infinite
prose that grows additively, incrementally and excessively with visuals which are machines for producing and managing multiplicity
// an incremental organising system that carries both actual form references and also metaphysical import
repetition of form forces attention on their construction as a syntax of sequenced components
getting purchase on the close-packed particulars of the material world
for all the complex systems and patterns governing the natural world, instead try to operate in the provisional and hypothetical //
the imaginative, or poetic nature of system building- just like the land observed is subject to the crumbling erosion of time
sensuous singularity>>art of walking is where the art happens, the documentation is simple recording the presence of a human
|| \\
walking as a strategy for gaining a deeper engagement with or appreciation of the world, it can choreograph and evoke intentionality / making walks in response to the pressures of contemporary life
walks as bodily and subjective encounters with landscape and temporalities /walking as a pilgrimage to celebrate what remains of nature
the representation of the walk is resolved by images or text, the walk is an absent presence | to hone sensory receptivity to the specificity of things>>
the wonder in attending closely to the world
