Holly Harrison

The paintings in Collected Stories are a new direction. Much of my previous work was image-based: places and objects rendered in loosely striped formations, allowing for narrative connections to resonate across them. At times I have focused on a single dominant image, often bird-related, with painted and collaged stripes adding energy and rhythm. This new body of work is a return to using stripes as structure, only now I’m stacking and relating fields of color and collage. The collage is a mix of things both random and meaningful that have been obscured with layers of paint: old shopping lists, vintage comics, book and magazine pages, printed papers, junk mail, my daughter’s early doodles, pieces of my husband’s works on paper, etc. (In the studio, nothing is safe.) Pulled from many different places, these elements bring with them a sense of story. The wash of paint acts to join the disparate pieces and also to obscure their content, so that what remains is more of an impression or hint, asking the viewer to look more closely.

This body of work is presently on view at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston in a duo exhibit with photographer Kristina McComb.

Pulled from two bodies of work—Strata and The Language of Lines—these paintings are all depictions of birds in various formations: in murmurations, startling into flight, and perched on wires or other structures. The title piece, Rise Up, is presently on view at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston.

This almost body of work is about the interplay between the horizontal and vertical elements. It began with the piece “A Fine Romance” as an exploration of what happens when you begin to assert verticality in the context of a strong horizontal composition. The jagged lines of the top collage row were inspired by the idea of sound wave imaging and, to a lesser degree, the jagged lines in medical imaging like cardiac monitors. The title of the piece references that obliquely while also nodding to the content of the found papers (some of which are samples from vintage romance book covers).

Varying the size of the collage elements resulted in different effects: The bands composed of smaller elements have more energy and fluidity, while the larger pieces are more object-like, book-like even, adding a kind of heft and solidity to the compositions, especially when the elements or in a vertical stack. “Realigned” switches the point of reference entirely: It is wired to hang two ways so that the horizon is not a fixed point but can run in either direction.