Holly Nicholls is a Scotland-based artist and researcher with an interest in porous boundaries. Her practice questions the role the visual might play in shaping ecological connection. 

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By engaging physically with environmental phenomena, she methodologically generates knowledge specifically preoccupied with hydro-spaces and their inhabitants. Working with elements of change as well as recorded detail, she produces an observational memory bank of encounters where remains of past actions (performed by bodies both human and not) can be traced. Through polymorphic practice she operates less within a linear body of artistic research but instead as surrounded by a cumulatively dense and abstract web of both visual and felt information. Often assembled together as open narratives, the work can be malleably composed into new scores of perspectives.

 

Imagining future encounters, relationships and trajectories with the more-than-human, Holly’s practice navigates our coexistence in environments that are becoming more and more precarious. Felt events (drawing, painting, print-making, moving image), allow for reenacting and remembering field experiences. This recall is grounded by tools such as physical contact, atmospheric markers and associative or emotional closeness. Holly aims to produce a type of subjective mapping which expands our experiences into more fluid or sensory understandings of ourselves and environmental temporalities. By engendering new modes of sensitivity to include non-human realities, Holly seeks kinship: charting connections between the local and the global, the real and the metaphorical, the bodily and the out of body— examining ways in which artistic practice can encourage more embodied understandings of self as collaborator within ecotonal sites.