Lisa Holden’s large-scale digital and multiple media works present densely layered images that explore aspects of feminine display and femininity, fusing iconography culled from an eclectic array of sources ranging from art historical portraiture to Victorian studio photography. Her compositions (printed as lambda prints and frequently glazed with translucent paints and lacquers) are constructed of imagery captured with digital still and video cameras then layered and collaged on the computer. Holden uses imaging software intuitively, letting flaws and imperfections creep into the fabric of the composition. The images’ broken contours and coarsely pixellated surfaces give the works a sense of hovering on the borderline between representation and abstraction.
In an early series of ‘portraits’, Holden shows disembodied faces framed in extreme close-up. Obliterated by heavily painted make-up and harsh lighting, the features take on an ambivalent, at times androgynous, sensuality. The rigorously cropped faces are larger than life which increases the sense of artificiality and abstraction in relation to the picture frame. In Gentian and Square, (both 2004) Holden seamlessly merges the features of several sitters in close-up ‘portraits’: a sign of the artist’s repeated attempts to come to terms with what has come to take the place of identity.
In
recent works, Holden’s figures (solitary or cloned in groups) have
appeared emerging from, or dissolving into, painterly backgrounds: ‘which
inevitably, perhaps, implies a narrative element that was absent from
the earlier ‘portraits’’. In Coconut (2004) and Through
the Wire (2004), a single figure is cut-and-pasted to form a group of
figures ‘within what seems to be a single space, thereby creating
a physical relation of proximity between them. (...) Yet their gazes are
either blank or averted. If they interact, it is not as figures interacting
with one another, but as players in some setting, the meaning of which
apparently eludes them. The works from 2005 take this process of generating
a non-explicit narrative even further. In Reveil (2005) – where
the use of the diptych conjures up the formal idiom of the Pre-Raphaelites
– a female nude on the left emerges from a wooded scene. Her head
is concealed by what looks like packaging, while on the right the Romantic
rock formation and dripping fountain complete the picture. She does not
pass unobserved, though, in this ‘natural’ setting: in the
left-hand panel she is observed by a tethered goat and a vague human figure
(the goatherd?) behind it, and the right-hand panel also contains a human
observer, silhouetted against the tree trunk on the left. Goats, whether
depicted in the act of copulating or not, traditionally connote lechery.
If we add it all up – the goat, the fountain, the naked female,
the voyeurs – we are presented with an erotic narrative, but a narrative
that is not told (or one that is so time-hallowed that it would be redundant
to tell it …). After all, it is we, the viewers, who construct that
narrative, it is not done for us by the work. We construct it, like a
work of bricolage, by making use of certain elements contained in the
work. But it remains a tale untold.’ (The
quotation is from the essay La Sala Reservada, 2005, by Peter Mason, which
accompanies Holden’s solo exhibition Untouchable, France Lejeune
Fine Art, Antwerp, 3.8-8.9.05).
website: www.lisa-holden.com
