“Sometime in the 1950’s tradition dried up, and with it, the ability to ‘read the signs’…Post WW11, fresh ways of thinking emerged that looked at the traditional foundations of our culture and identified them as man-made myths, open to interpretation and change. Enthusiastic optimism was gradually replaced by dark shadows of anxiety as each new ‘truth’ revealed its agenda and was quickly super-ceded. Certainty quickly turned to uncertainty and life increasingly seems like a game to which we do not have the rules.” -Linda Holloway, 2007
Linda Holloway's 'How To Read Signs' is fraught with ideas that shift between anxiety and optimism, innocence and knowingness.
The artist has moved away from the random abstraction and consistent glazed finish of previous paintings to explore new subject, medium and surface relationships. Holloway combines a new evocative palette and more directed techniques in this latest series - including the layering of figurative forms throughout her pieces - making us immediately aware of a potential narrative running throughout each composition.
Holloway creates an atmosphere of carnival with images that suggest lark and play, imbued with streaks and forms of bright colour and line, and developing a range of perspectives and distance. Symbols of castles, jesters, wolves, herds of domestic animals, and tiny ‘girl guide’ figures appear throughout the series. As well as the innocent, child-like symbolism, Holloway's works can be seen to house disquieting symbols and hallucinogenic swirling – while overtly commenting on genetic engineering and other political anxieties:
"We fret about everything, despite being the most comfortable, healthy, educated, mobile and (mis)informed people ever. The media feeds these anxieties day by day, with disparate news’ reports of the ‘Bush surge” and the ‘pharming’ of cheap protein based drugs, in human gene injected chicken ‘bio-reactors’.”
The titles of the works, with their serious, instruction-manual tone, serve to ask questions rather than answer them. They are drawn from the text of a 1950s encyclopaedia as suggested activities that ‘any clever boy or girl could do’ - ‘How To Read Signs’; ‘How To Make Foucault’s Pendulum’; ‘How To Make A Fish That Comes When Called’; ‘How To Make An Eskimo Village In A Tea Tray’ - activities full of possibility but fraught with an anxiety in their making.
Holloway invites the viewer to link the symbolic elements into a structure that fits with these titles - in attempting to find the demonstration within these riddles the series allows the viewer to partake in a feeling which is long departed from Western society - a sense of the unbridled optimism of a more innocent time. But in the end the ambiguity of the forms allows an openness of interpretation - our degree of cynicism may well determine how we read the signs.
BIOGRAPHICAL:
Qualifications: Master of Fine Arts (Honours) in Painting, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland
Awards and Distinctions: Wallace Art Awards - Finalist (2006); Under-Coat (collaborative project with group ‘Skirt’) invited to attend Vienna Festival (2006)
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