Travelling between the Ness and a converted barn/studio each day, narratives and objects garnered from the site and surrounding area seeped into Holley’s creative process. The exhibition’s title work, The Growth of Communication, 2022, makes vivid allusions to contemporary technological entrapment. From the carcass of an antiquated dial telephone a trail of entangled cables emerge and knot themselves into a dense mass. Through these metal clusters multiple silhouettes of faces are discernible. Repeating spectral human forms throughout the paintings and works on paper signal ancestral presences, with symbolic references that point towards ideas of interconnectivity and interdependence, as padlocks, chains and wires shackle us to the histories and technologies we have created. The works in the exhibition seem to offer windows onto former and future worlds, yet are underpinned by a sense of the urgent need for humanity to apprehend our shared universal destiny.
Edel Assanti
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