Holly Anderson

When my bikini body is on the beach, I’m sandwiched between white sunlight and deep blue shades. This state is cloistered, a strange claustrophobia between warm and cool, light and dark, a reminder of my strange involvement in these troubled landscapes, their messy games.

Light: The light in these paintings is a kind many of us are familiar with light from Australian beaches; white hot, blinding and oppressive. Anderson plays with this like raw material. Like two sides of a coin, white spaces can read as overexposed and full of potential, or alternately, empty, barren spaces. In works like ‘Cleavage’ or ‘Stickwoman’ the exposed surface of the painting seems almost too bright to see, or too hot to handle.

Dark: shadows and black lines have a dappled ubiquity throughout her paintings, revealing themselves upon closer inspection to be made of the same stuff. This ubiquity hints at something hidden, a malevolent scent felt across all these depicted experiences. In works like ‘Leaf listening’ the shadow of the artist’s body hovers in a garden bed, somewhere between lilac leaves, bright white highlights and jolts of deep shade. here the body is imprinted on the world, messily embedded and dutifully implicated in its strange systems. As shadows beneath leaves become more grossly abstracted under the glare, a strange disintegration of the artist’s body seems to be taking place.

for holly, painting is a means to think through the neuroses inherent to living in a damaged world. an illusion of anthropocentrism (or a safe distance from nature) cannot be upheld under the conditions of climate knowledge. the way anderson experiences landscapes of burleigh beach or stradbroke island, cannot be divorced from this. rather, the beach looks the same but is felt viscerally differently. haunted by an uncanny sense of imminent apocalypse or contamination. with reference to classic motifs of the bather in romantic landscape painting, holly considers the romanticised bather in an environment undergoing massive psychic and ecological change. the bikini body a speck embedded within a threatened ecology, beneath panels of hot white glare.

shadows linger over leaves on sidewalk greenery, nets of highlights and shadows are cast about. a strange flatnesses reveal a hazy, disjointed reality. holly fiddles slyly with our perception of these landscapes, locating the bikini body as a space more viscerally entangled in landscapes. In these works, hot wind whips hair, leaves and skeletal entrails into ambiguously threatening spaces. A possibility of knowing, or never knowing, how we fit into a precarious ecosystem is potentialised. all under hot, hot sun.