Holly Whitnell

Holly Whitnell (b. 2004) is a painter concerned with the weight of the word ‘experience’, and more specifically, what constitutes the act of experiencing.
Informed by how we feel, recall, and reimagine, she uses painting as her primary meditation. With these elements, she abstracts reimagined landscapes and turns to mixed medial approaches to materialise this sense of ambiguity and a warped reality. Her work questions why certain moments stay with us—why they resonate beyond the everyday—and how the attention attributed to a moment makes it become something else; an internal way of perceiving experience translated into material form.
Right now, her art exists in a kind of flux: between seeing and not seeing, feeling and feelings of absence. There’s a resemblance there too—something that makes recognition possible for others and conforms to a contemporary aesthetic dialogue. A kind of analogue to objective reality.
But within this, ambiguity questions this act of representing and introduces a maybe?— a dimension of seeing that becomes entirely subjective, and a space felt rather than defined. Colour here plays a significant role, and at times, its absence does too. Everything is considered, even in its uncertainty—mirroring the instability of perception.

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