Holly Nicholls is a British artist based in Scotland. Her multi-disciplinary practice draws on research enquiry, poetic sensibility and material curiosity to engage with ideas of abstraction and connection with the environment. Using accrued layers of observation; performed, repeated and reversed gestures build a cumulative lexicon. Preoccupied by the gaps between what we see and the language we use to describe it [experience > articulation], her practice operates in the provisional, the hypothetical and the imaginative— imbuing a poetic nature to system building. 

 

Recent work has centered around the motion and cycles of the sterna paradisaea || Arctic Tern. Using time as a durational tool and movement as embodied knowledge, she continues to use this research to mimetically understand her own sense of passage and belonging. By utilising place and/or species based research: charting connections between the local and the global, the real and the metaphorical, the bodily and the out of body, the human and the always-more-than-human, Holly plays with a more fluid and sensory understanding of self as material. With an emphasis on hydro-landscapes, the work inhabits sustained physical experiences of ecological temporalities and phenomena. By examining the cadence between these internal and external landscapes, her practice seeks to substantiate the incorporeality of personal mythologies concerning being and moving within the natural world.