Holly Nicholls
b. Northumberland 1996
Holly Nicholls is a British artist and writer based in Scotland. Her multi-disciplinary practice investigates the way in which the realms of language, mark making and landscape interact. For Holly, an engagement with repetition results in a gathering of non-quantifiable data which embodies the insoluble relationship between human beings and the natural world. With a largely place-responsive process, she inserts herself inside ideas of legibility and abstraction in regard to the mobile density of the material world. Accruing abstract layers of observation through both site responsive research and physical experiences, the work is often visually reduced into simple formats which can be received in fluid environments. Nicholls’ intuitive practice spans large scale drawings and paintings, print-making, poetry and film; allowing her to physically engage with the bonds between the tactile world and the act of making itself. Her most recent work uses muscle memory and recall to create a swinging pendulum between words and marks. A lexicon of flicks, twists, turns, hesitations, pushes, drags, pauses and folds has become the terrain in which she cultivates meaning and form. To translate the beating sensitivity that is felt when experiencing a place, considerations regarding: gathering, offering, arranging, kinship, adapting, borrowing, transposing, negotiating and composing are acts of ritual within her practice.
education
2020-2021
MA Contemporary Art Practice
Edinburgh College of Art
2015-2018
BA Fine Art
Bath School of Art and Design
2014-2015
Foundation in Art & Design
Arts University Bournemouth
selected group exhibitions, awards and residencies
2021
MA Graduate Show, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh.
2020
Alumni show, Sion Hill Gallery , Bath.
2019
30th Anniversary, Beside the Wave, Falmouth.
Environments, Tate St. Ives.
2018
Look, Freelands Foundation, London.
Cluster, Truman Brewery, London.
CODA, Bargehouse OXO Tower, London.
Undergraduate Degree Show Bath School of Art and Design.
ART, popup exhibition in Walcot Street, Bath.
5 Years of the Porthleven Prize, Newton Park, Bath.
2017
Raw, CAST studios, Helston.
As the weather, Bath Spa Porthleven Prize exhibition, Bath.
2016
Winner of the Bath Spa Porthleven Prize Residency.
2015
Refract, 44AD Gallery, Bath.