Holly Harrison

This body of work is about the interplay between the horizontal and vertical elements. It really 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.

Similar to the Language of Lines series, the artwork in the Color Fields series is strongly horizontal. The difference is that here the bands of color are themselves the subject. Floated against a bold background color, the fields are both contained by the dark frame of color and act as containers themselves. Variations in the content of what each one holds—color, texture, collage, paper—create a rhythm for the eye of the viewer as it moves across the surface. And in a similar manner to the Strata body of work, there is a sense that the juxtaposition of elements is creating a series of relationships, a dialog, or even a kind of poetic visual narrative.

The focus of this series is on the creation of a single multilayered image and a distillation within that image of the essential elements of line and movement. That tension between the painted stripes and the organic shapes of birds, trees and wings is where the life of each painting lies.

Over time, the compositions have opened up, becoming more focused on the horizontal stripes and lines and how they accumulate and interact. This body of work leaves behind the image-to-image narrative structure of the Strata paintings to focus on the interplay of imagery and stripes.

Additionally, there is significant attention paid to what’s underneath: Each piece starts with a colorful underpainting and the process of masking and unmasking that background while painting results in a richly nuanced environment. While there are numerous textured stripes of various sizes and intensities, they are also given space to resonate. And on the surface, the painted lines are echoed and reinforced by the addition of collage elements that are both semi-transparent and opaque. 

Composed of loosely linked images that include drawings, photographic transfers and found materials (including sampled artwork by the artist's husband and young daughter), the Strata paintings explore meaning in a non-linear fashion through the resonance that occurs between the different layers of imagery.

The process is intuitive and spontaneous: As the piece develops, each new row of image, pattern or texture responds to what's already there and in turn influences choices of what to layer on top. The resulting banded artwork is visually reminiscent of the strata exposed in cliffs or riverbanks.

Repeating certain images while layering and recombining them onto the panels in fresh combinations allows the artist to explore interactions already in play in the series. This results in new relationships and narratives, while also building a personal lexicon of images tied to a growing range of themes: time, place, natural history and the nature of memory. 

The Quick + the Dead series relies on the building up of layers of transparency and the juxtaposition of two types of imagery: taxidermy birds (photographed in the Peabody Collection in Cambridge, MA) and birds sharing our environment (perching on wires, flying in flocks, etc.). 

An undercollage (of found papers and painted color fields) and multiple layers of white paint (repeatedly applied and scraped away) ground each composition by providing a neutral yet nuanced background. The compositions make use of transparency in different ways: layers of things hidden and revealed create a tension between what is visible and what is not. The juxtaposition of birds living in a human environment with ones that are collected and displayed provides an ironic gloss on how people catalog and objectify the living creatures they seek to understand. 

For now, this section of the website is a bit of a catch-all for pieces that are transitional or one-offs; or—as in the case of the animal portraits—they are part of a series-in-waiting. These are part of a planned series about endangerment and extinction. Although playful in tone, the reimagined Flemish portraits are both an homage to lost species and an admonition for us to do better.