Artist Statement
The figures and color-scapes within Holland's work represent the experiences and emotions that we carry with us and how beautiful, interesting, and familiar they become when we offer to them our highest form of generosity: our awareness.
The beauty of an awareness that is open is the space it creates between an experience and ourselves. That spaciousness allows one to have a relationship with that moment - to notice its qualities, feel it in the body, and allow the heart to touch it. It allows one to see that moment more clearly for what it is - fluid, transient, impermanent, and precious. The artist's act of creating these images is a practice in awareness of the experiences and emotions that she carries, allowing her to feel them with an extension of the heart. It is an exploration of questions and is a process of becoming more familiar with the things that are here with a vulnerability that sometimes does not lend itself to words.
How are we with the things that arise, between the time they are received and the time at which we are able to let them go? What happens when we can bring to a moment, or an experience, the beauty and spaciousness born from an awareness of the heart? What happens to our relationships with ourselves, with each other?
Holland's process is slow, its meditative quality elevating the process and act of labor. Most work is small in scale, but she has recently begun to re-investigate the larger format. Holland currently works with gouache, watercolor, pencil, pen, hand-made papers, etchings, woodcut, silkscreen, fabric, thread, and gold leaf. Most supports are recycled/repurposed wood and fabric.
THE PORTRAITS
The primary intent of this (ongoing) portrait series, informally titled Tangents, is connection: finding an excuse to spend some quality time with some incredibly talented people I know. Each portrait is done in person (never from photograph), as a way to capture the energy of the human and the moment.
THE HERALDS
The little creatures I paint, which I call my Heralds, began with the drawing below (She Wears Her Demons with Grace, 2012). A Herald is defined as a messenger bringing news, a call to arms, or a person or thing viewed as a sign that something is about to happen.
In Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” which breaks down the hero's journey, he brings to light the parallels between the stories of Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Roman and Greek mythology and other folklore to expose their interconnectedness. I’m interested in how, exactly, my own inner Heralds would look and act, and their role in the universality of our inner worlds.
The frog [from the fable The Princess and the Frog], come as by miracle, can be termed the “herald”; the crisis of his appearance is the call to adventure. His summons may be to live, die, sound the call to an historical undertaking, mark the dawn of religious illumination, signify coming of adolescence. It marks the awakening of self. The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration–a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage. The herald is often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world: yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through walls of day into the dark where jewels glow. [...] Or the herald is a beast representative of the repressed instinctual fecundity within ourselves, or the unknown.
(Joseph Campbell, Hero of a Thousand Faces)
She Wears Her Demons with Grace
Ink and Marker on Paper, 2012. NFS
drawing by Maddie Ford
About the Artist
Originally from Oregon, she recently moved to the NEK with her family after nearly 20 years in Boston. A graduate of the Boston University Fine Arts program, she went on to run a non-profit art gallery, toured the East Coast with a pop-rock band, and has been teaching yoga and meditation for the last decade. Since relocating to East Burke, she has leaned heavily into her art and the art community here and currently works out of her painting studio in St Johnsbury.