Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything –
that's how the light gets in.
-Leonard Cohen-


Childhood is the forge and foundry in which we are created, in which we manufacture ourselves. My name is Holly; I was born an artist. Home life and growing up, was one of sadness, pain, sickness, and negativity. As a child i was extremely emotional and over imaginative and spent a lot of time alone, allowing me to imagine and dream to my hearts content. Had art not saved me, I would have been swallowed whole.

I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's on the weekends. She was a loving, lively woman who delighted in the aesthetic, in imagination, and in creating visually rich representations of her own generous and complex inner life.

When I was born, Grandma started a doll collection for me, and added to it anytime she or any of her friends travelled. She used to call me Holly Dolly, and when I was older, I would be excited for the weekends when I could convince her to take the dolls down, so that I could hold them and look at them. I had wanted to give them all names, and I began telling stories of who they were and what they might be like. Dolls were a means of escape to me; someone else to be, some other life to live.

As a child, I spent hours and days in the back yard collecting, mixing, and arranging all sorts of natural organic matter. I would wash them or paint them in mud, lay them to dry, arrange them until they gave me a good feeling inside. I loved the textures and colors and beauty in natural objects – objects that have been softened by time or nature. All children are, by nature, alchemists. I was working with grass and mud and sticks and rocks – and by so doing, I was forging a self, and a vision of my world.

In Jr. High and High School I took an art class and my whole world changed.  Art to me is a way of visually communicating what is on the inside to others and quite often myself.  The idea that I might be able to visually represent a feeling, or an emotion is really important to me.  That is what I'm really trying to communicate.. Emotion.  Emotion drives my artwork. 

In my assemblage work as an artist, I love using organic materials, found objects, and rusted treasures to create an often mystical and psychological landscape. When I am making a doll, I am turning a part of me inside out. I am sharing myself with you, or I am telling a story.

Whether I am making dolls or creating assemblage my favorite materials to work with are old, weathered, rusted, soiled - aged or impacted in some substantial way. With dolls, I like to use vintage fabrics, trims and laces. I also love to tea or coffee stain my fabrics to encourage that sense of history and memory I am in love with. New, manufactured, unused materials do not attract my attention. I can tell a love story for every weathered, rusted object I find; or perhaps it is a love story of tragedy, pain and neglect.

It has taken a long time to be ready to move my process out of my backyard, my Grandmother’s living room, my studio. I am excited, and – truth be told, a little scared, to invite you into my world, my thoughts, my stories. Welcome.

     

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