clip taken from 13.5 minute video

Resurrection Stories

clip taken from 9 minute 3 screen video

Installaton shots resurrection stories

djanogly gallery 2005

The Almond Tree

clip from ‘The Almond Tree’ 2004

The Almond Tree (2)

The Almond Tree clip no.02

Vessel installation

in Porto, Portugal

Vessel installation

in Nottingham, UK

13.5 minute video
This work was commissioned by Groundwork and Horse and Bamboo Theatre Company in 2008 as part of the ‘Valley of Stone’ project. The aim of the commission was to produce work inspired by the landscape and it’s associated history.
The area of Rossendale in Lancashire has a duality about it. The landscape is grandiose and beautiful yet it’s been utilized in many different ways over the years, constantly evolving with industrial and social change. Large chunks of hillside are missing, quarried for the stone and subsidence above ground reminds us of what must have been taken out beneath our feet.
The video ‘Hineingrabe’ (to ‘dig into’) looks at the two worlds above and below ground. It reflects the areas quarrying and mining history whilst drawing on elements of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story, ‘The Mines at Falun’ in which the hero descends into the black underworld of the mine and is lead on by ghostly visions of the ‘Metal Queen’ who shows him the treasure embedded in the seam of ore. He becomes obsessed with bringing to the surface this red jewel he sees at the heart of the depths.
Descent to the labyrinthine underworld to bring back something of value is reminiscent of journeys found in many other mythologies. Also referenced in the work is the story found in local writings of the black dog or Boggart, which once liberated from underground stalks the earth and dissolves like water when struck. This dog that watches the lower world has parallels to Cerberus (translated as ‘demon of the pit’), who conducts the dead down to Hades. The film alludes to the origin of the stone’s creation, how this ancient material is itself the embodiment of the change from fluid to solid and also from the surface to the depths, from light to dark.

‘Hineingrabe’ was screened at The Horse and Bamboo Theatre in Waterfoot, Lancashire in December 2008.

View video stills on Flickr

IMAGE and Imagination is the unimaginative title for a show of photographic works by Tracey Holland, Lynne Silverman; Oded Shimshon and Chris Taylor. The artists have little in common other than a desire to break from the photographic format of a straight single-shot viewpoint. Images tend instead to be combined, superimposed or arranged in sequences.
Holland has distinguished herself in the past as an assemblage artist. Two of her assemblages are included here to form a background to her recent forays into photography. Of the four it is Holland who most activates the imagination, partly because of her almost total disregard and disrespect for clean-cut photographic conventions.
Her cibachrome colour prints present still.life tableaux of things like dead birds, playing cards, withered bouquets, fish fins and false teeth. All this decaying mess is arranged to form compositions of remarkable sensitivity and inventiveness. The work, far from seeming morbid, is quite simply startlingly beautiful.
One walks into a photographic gallery expecting to see images of obvious social and political relevance tidied up in an air of homeground coffee and wholefood buns. Holland’s work actively demonstrates the true meaning of imagination to disturb the viewer out of complacency into the dizziness at the edge of the unimaginable. These are some of the best photographs I’ve seen for ages precisely because they don’t look like photographs at all.
In comparison the rest of the show seems more like the work of professional photographers. Chris Taylor’s photographs taken during a journey through Asia and Australia are arranged like mementoes into groups of two or four. Oded Shimshon attempts to imply the absence of the photographer by setting up her tripod and recording the day-long changes of light and shadow on isolated objects, a block of stone or giant pumpkin. Lynn Silverman’s Furniture Fictions are juxtapositions of two horizontal images. One will be some sort of table top, the other something entirely divorced in them such as a dog’s backside.
One thing the exhibition suggests is that photography, always so concerned with proving itself a self-sufficient art medium, can be more exciting when it rejects its technical purity and opens out to be refreshed by other creative approaches.
Untitled Gallery, Sheffield until April 8

Chapter ShowsTHE practice of rooting through the rubbish dump and refuse bin for items to deploy in an art context has had its devotees since Schwitters and his Merz movement of the Twenties. The neo-Dadaists of the Fifties and Sixties and others more recently, have exploited it so thoroughly that one wonders whether there can be much more mileage in the idiom.
Tracey Holland thinks there is, and her montages are authoritative enough to convince one that here is an artist working with compulsion, honesty and an unusually sensitive eye for the patinas of decay. She orchestrates her junk -fishbones, candles, snakeskins, keys, photo fragments and various sorts of goo -with fine discrimination, sometimes using painted passages to enrich her compositions.
Holland gives some of her work a contemporary flavour by using photography ;but Simon Crump’s photo-collages look much more-immediately relevant to the contemporary world. His large wall panels may be seen as icons for our time (one, in the form of a cross, is entitled Icon). As Seen On TV is a 24 ft by 12 ft composite panel, dark, oppressive, and composed of pictorial cell clusters, dozens of miniature images on acetate. This and other panels incorporate domestic, industrial, biological, ethnic and meteorological themes.
Chapter Arts centre, Cardiff, to July 9.

‘The title for this piece of work refers to books which go to make up the Old Testament. The word means hidden (Greek; apokrupto), “because they were wont to be read not openly, but as it were in secret, and apart (Bible, 1539, preface to the Apocrypha). Their authenticity was doubted by the Protestants and so the word ‘apocryphal’ means not genuine or not authentic. This duality of meaning is reflected in the nature of the transparent photographs of the children’s heads and the chest x-rays. The heads depict the outside whilst the x-rays reveal the ordinarily hidden inside, a poignant reminder of the skeletal form beneath the flesh. Other photographic panels contain images which act as an inventory of lost, discarded and outgrown things (such as nails, scales, snakeskins, candles and hair); other objects depicted are used to cut and trim (scissors, blades, shears). The flanking photographic panels depict images of 16 pairs of bird wings. Here, they are represent the soul, highlighting an inner and outer world.
The light is essential to affect a transmutation or change; like an x-ray revealing the inner bones. Colour is added to the work by both the toning of the photographs and the light shining through pigmented waxed paper. Some of these paper images are taken from children’s encyclopaedias and show blood circulatory systems. Some are strewn with hair or seeds which are caught and held on the paper whilst the wax is hot.’

Tracey Holland was born in Birmingham and studied Fine art at Exeter University. She has had numerous one person and group exhibitions and is represented in a number of public collections.

Review
Mortal Remains Sheffield

Tracey Holland’s recent work relates directly to a long line of collage and assemblage art that stretches from the Dadaist Schwitters through Cornell to Kienholz and Rauschenberg. This is a creative vision made up of discarded oddments, rusted urban detritus and the occasional stuffed,
shrivelled or mouldy remains of wild animal life. Many an art student has gone on expedition round the tips, skips and gutters of the Western world and come up with nothing more than empty mock surreal emulations. Holland in comparison is a rare original. Her show comes across with the arresting force of some unheard-of obsession or embarrasingly wierd perversion. Dead reptiles, dried and faded flowers, a glass eye, old board games, scraps of old books and letters are arranged and photographed to form an enchanting late 20th century revival of memento mori still-life. Somehow Holland manages to imbue every detail with an aura of fetishistic significance.

Evidences of sadistic or ritualistic violence, such as a severed and sliced open pig’s head, are given an extra edge of discomfort by being wreathed in pearls and a delicate mist of red shiffon.
The show has a multi-media installation and several mixed media assemblages in addition to the photographs but the most powerful pieces are often the simplest, those in which the easy charms of collaged clutter are most resisted. Almost anyone else using a photograph of a bat in an artwork today would fall into Hammer horror film cliche. Holland presents a detail of an outstretched bat’s wing and it has all the moody resonance of the Gothic tradition with none of its melodramatic grotesquerie.

Robert Clark
Untitled Gallery Sheffield 1992

The Crack magazine

September 1992

Review

Mortal Remains
Zone Gallery
Newcastle

Unlike the heroine of Rohmers movie, Tracey Holland probably does not collect men, she does however, collect everything else! The result of her magpie like activity is Mortal Remains an exhibition of photographs that opens at the Zone Gallery this month. Candles, sheet music, sheep sheers, glass eyes, old clocks and other pieces of human detritus provide the backdrop for the real subject of the images, the dead creatures of various kinds that litter their surfaces. Not that the work is in any way morbid, if anything, through its use of cool lighting and delicate gauze filters, it brings a serenity to this charnel house of amphibians, avians and mammals. Although they do not conform to the conventions of photographic composition (Holland was originally a painter), there is a studied beauty about the images, which belies their content, the content at times being almost lost (at a distance anyway) under an overwhelming abstraction. An installation will also be on show. Tracey Holland’s Mortal Remains (sic!) is showing from September 17 to October 10th at Zone Gallery.

MARK LITTLE

VISUAL ARTS REVIEW

Photographs and Installation Work by Tracey Holland at Zone Gallery, Newcastle until October 24.

Tracey Holland’s collection of Mortal Remains includes dead birds, fish, and reptiles, a fnlit-bat, and assorted animal fragments. Often accompanied by the likes of withered flowers, old clock faces, fish books and scraps of paper, the remains are assembled into tableaux and el1′ectively embalmed by being photographically recorded in large Cibachrome prints.
Superficially, the subject matter suggests links with both the long- standing use of worthless and disagreeable objects as an assault on traditional artistic values, and with the easy sensationalism of recent exhibitions featuring dismembered dogs and lumps of fly - infested meat. But rather than being shocking, cynical or gleefully morbid, Tracey Holland’s images are reverential and poignant, and ultimately have less in common with confrontational art than with traditional painting -particularly still lives.
Chardin’s paintings of dead game are recalled by pheasants hung in a chipped gilt frame, while finches and starlings wreathed by faded petals hint at Greuzian and Victorian sentimentality. Reminiscences of Arcimboldo appear in an assemblage of cod, whitebait and black cord forming a human profile, and the pinkness of a pig’s severed head placed with strings of pearls against a baby blue background, perversely conjures up Boucher’s Rococo nudes.
Art historical associations apart, the evocative richness of the work prompts speculation on a range of issues including our own mortality, attitudes to animals, and to the edible and expendable. Above all though, Tracey Holland’s photographs unite technical excellence, painterly sensitivity to colour and compelling imagination to arrest the natural progression of her subjects towards decay and the dustbin, and to invest them with a paradoxical beauty.
Art’s power to transform is less apparent in the installation incorporating two large assemblages ­triptychs enclosed by battered window frames. Flattened beneath the glass, pairs of birds’ wings nestle on a background of human hair matted with gobbets of papier mache, glass eyes, rusty hairgrips, keys, cutlery and razor blades. This is a nightmare version of something blocking the sink, and on a more monstrous level, recalls the hangars full of hair and other pathetic gleanings stockpiled in Nazi death camps. Where the photographs’ uniform surface reduces texture to Oat areas of seductive colour, here, the physicality of feathers, hair and other materials is inescapable, and despite the balanced symmetry of the compositions they induce a queasy disorientation.
The cumulative el1′ect of the exhibition shares something with Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief etc., where sumptuous banquets, and pantechnicons of putrefying meat and fish alternately arouse appetite and revulsion. Beyond this immediate ability to prod the viewer out of complacency, Tracey Holland’s work leaves a lasting resonance -the product of a genuinely disturbing imagination.

Stephanie Brown