Jill Holder

The Essence of Memory

The Essence of Memory, The Front Room, The Beaney Canterbury 2014

This large show explored the human desire to collect and collate. Shared with Bob Lamoon, we made works (individually) to answer all the “W”s – why, what where, and when.

 

The Indiscriminate Collector 2014
A life size sculpture formed from all the badly chosen, badly preserved items that he has collected, The Indiscriminate Collector drags a huge net behind him containing more of his ‘finds’.

Shades of the Hollow Shore – Clays 2013/14
Air dried clay figures embellished with street finds, mounted in whitewood boxes.

Shades of the Hollow Shore Paper 2013/14
Simple lino cuts, roughly made, embellished with objects found in the street or on the beach. (discarded ring pulls, feathers, bits of plastic broken jewelry etc)

Flayed Sock 2014
Wool, linen thread

Visitor maps 2013 Charcoal on paper
What Happened 2012 Children’s toys in small glass vitrine.

Dead Men, Live Words 2014
Words by great authors and poets preserved in wax-sealed boxes marked by their photographs

Hub 2014
Clay, wood, iron.

Pandora’s Shoes 2014
A pair of vintage children’s shoes filled with nails.

Flask 2014
The note that goes with this work reads “Of a type common in the last half of the C20th and the first half of the C21st, this flask would have held holy water from a spring in Vergeze, France. (The box contains a smashed Perrier bottle carefully pieced back together).

Public engagement Work

66 Elephants Drawn by Beaney Visitors or What Happened While we Were Talking. 2013/14
One of three public engagement works by Holder which looked at the darker side of collecting. This image of poached elephant tusks – the reality of collecting ivory – surrounded by sweetly naïve drawings of elephants draws our attention to the harm that our appetites for curios can cause.

The Collected Breath of 24 Strangers United in a Common Pursuit or The Last Breath 2013/14
The second work in this series presents us with a rather intangible collection, one might almost say pointless in this instance, of breath captured in sealed glass files. Above we see the image of a dying child – to whom, as death through starvation approaches taking the next breath, or the last, becomes harder and harder.

The Thumbnails of 30 people who I have met and the thumbprint of one whom I am glad I did not 2013/14
In this, the final work of this series, the impressions of thumbnails of 30 people are juxtaposed against the image of the thumbprint of a serial killer. We do not always know, the artist supposes, exactly where our quests might take us.