’Holly Stevenson Tracing the Irretraceable’

P. 17 EF(Question): Your series ‘going evoke the masked ball, while the heads that double as knitting machines, hanging pieces inspired by votives, and pots in a perpetual state of becoming all have a certain theatricality or performativity.

HS: ‘Increasingly those figures read like actors from the Commedia dell’arte, but more like the Neapolitan version featuring Pulcinella. That kind of exaggerated gesture is such a good way of telling stories. I have my own characters, like the Cyclops, the Ball Eye, the Mother, the Narcissus, the Medusa. I love to bring performance into the work if i can.’

‘I’ve always used faces in my work, I just haven’t made anatomically correct heads, that is a bit of a departure. But there’s always some sense of the limb that can talk, or the articulated body part that acts as a talking head.’

‘My work isn’t moral or realistic. ‘Going’ a series of 8 landscapes moving from dawn to dusk was based on the idea of death masks but they are actually taken from LED beauty masks, the human heads as the knitting machine portraits, are slightly different; they are really about Object Relations Theory, they’re attracted to their lost objects. I made three series of heads for the exhibition, I was concerned with objects that potentially could see but through the lens of death, so in effect had lost the same sight as us.

P.11 ‘Beauty masks that conjure death’