Art Book Series
2020 - Art - Lily Hollywell - Published 01/09/2020
Lily Hollywell likes making art that is a response to the inner workings of their psyche and can also represent the relationship her insides have with the external world. This manifests primarily through painting, collage and drawing but also video, writing and performance. Lily believes that all art is a form of communication, but that the message will be different for every individual. They find it important to let go of control and to go with the artistic flow, seeing where the processes end up.
https://lilyhollywell.myportfolio.com/
Art Book Series
Text by Rosa Sawyers
In the toilet of my childhood home, there is a copy of ‘The Art Book’ - an A5 ‘pocket-book’ made by Phaidon. Described as “An accessible, informative and fun A–Z guide to artists from medieval times to the present day”; ‘The Art Book’ contains over 500 selected artists and their respective pieces. As a child I used the book as a makeshift fortune-teller; whichever spread I opened at random indicated that day's possibilities.
The book with its vast, yet selective collection of artworks is the subject of Lily Hollywell’s recent project. ‘Art Book Series’ is an abstract and improvised response to ‘The Art Book’. Lily responds to every spread, one by one, working onto the book’s pages with various mediums including paint, collage, and drawing. Some of the spreads are completely obscured, the page's original content hidden under layers of paint and paper. Her choices in what is covered and what is exposed controls how much of the book that we see.
Lily’s work is more often than not led by her use of hand-drawn symbols, a language of glyphs and spells that she’s been developing since early 2019. Lily would regularly go out and draw her symbols in public places. Bridges, car parks, and pathways acting as a canvas for environmental art. Last year I helped document one of Lily’s early performances named “Ritual Action Performance Whackery”, performed at a group show hosted at and responding to House for an Art Lover in Glasgow.
I spent the day capturing Lily drawing symbols and markings onto the ground using clay, pressing the terracotta onto the floor with her hands. Her pieces spanned the location's main car park, connecting and linking the other artists’ pieces in the garages surrounding the space. Lily explained that the symbols and markings that she drew throughout the evening were to connect and unite her and her group to the space. Her work often holds an ambiguous spiritual quality, what feels like an aged language or magic.
Recently, these recurring symbols are commonly overlaid or printed alongside various materials and surfaces, creating tactile creations of mixed media collage and graphic markings. The abstract and colourful pages of Lily’s Art Book are littered with deconstructed parts of her symbols, like a form of shorthand.
When I last saw Lily, I was able to look at her copy of The Art Book. The book is small and compact, the uniformity of the pages’ layout ingrained in my brain from childhood. Lily’s additions have broken this uniformity. The white and clinical edges of the book block are now coloured, the lines are no longer straight but waved. Lily’s worked-on pages are thicker and stronger than the others, her layers of paper and pigment build onto the book like a canvas. It’s original content acts like the lines of a notepad - a suggestion for what is yet to come.
The book's variety in styles and eras of art allows for Lily to respond to each spread like an isolated piece, her responses simultaneously obscuring and alluding to the original artist.
Looking through Lily’s copy of The Art Book, I stopped at an image of a spread that she’s called "Andre Beaneveu / Domenico Beccafumi" (the two artists originally featured on the pages). The content of the page itself is obscured by a layer of lilac paint, with circles in white and beige. Behind the paint you can see the remnants of text and image, illegible words peer through layers of paint. On the one page is a meme, on the other a print out of a woodcut. Lily told me that the images were sent to her by a friend during lockdown; the images tucked into letters and sent across the country - the analogue version of sharing a meme with your friend over Instagram. In this respect; the book is a diary, a log of visual stimulus, the shapes and colours you see when you look at the sun.
One particular spread (Algardi Alessandro / Washington Allston) is partially obscured and marked boldly in black ink and red paint. Alessandro’s bust of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Zacchia sits on the left, underneath a layer of deep red. The shadows of the sculpture are visible through the paint, giving the illusion of a room in red light. Black lines frame the bust and cross over to the other page - with Allston's work washed with white paint, forms from the original image are visible through the paint, and mimicked with grey markings.
Some of my favourite spreads completely ignore the book’s content. "Jacopo Bassano / Pompeo Batoni" is a very graphic spread made of two rectangles of paper, symmetrically layers with vibrant, pen-drawn circles and ovals across the pages. This spread feels like an intermission, a momentary break or exhale.
This contrasts "John James Audubon / Frank Auerbach", a spread coated in a transparent layer of ultramarine, almost allowing the original content to peep through an ocean-like filter. With the paint Lily has drawn attention to the subject from Audubon’s painting, the Roseate Spoonbill, the only part of the page untouched by blue. It’s pale desaturated colours glow against the vibrant paint, and it appears as if the bird is in a pool of water. Painted white lines cross the pages and create the illusion of movement. A flow of water, the flap of a wing.
This playful and intuitive investigation into an object’s purpose explores many contexts. The Art Book was made as a guide for those curious about ‘art’ in general - a very broad and impossible task for a small book. By obscuring the book's content with a personal, emotional response, what does it become? More or less of an ‘art book’? More or less of a guide?
It was maybe a year ago when I saw her rifling through the bins in my studio, she told me that design students have the best trash - she was right. Lily was collecting material for her collages, with arms full of paper she left, taking with her my studio's unwanted work. I see now retrospectively how much this influenced my work. While going over each other's work, Lily and I discussed my last project ‘ Is This Yours? Can I Have It?’ - an archive experiment documenting a4 paper from the bins in my university. Both of our projects utilise and experiment with a body of found imagery and text; and with our respective visual languages and disciplines, we work directly with and onto the reference itself.
My love for working with found and disposable imagery is what led me to focus on the Art Book Series. I often fetishize my collections so much that I refuse to work on them directly as if my additions would take away the integrity of the collection. Seeing and touching Lily’s copy of The Art Book creates something entirely different. Her work both emotionally and aesthetically responds to the book's content. It is both one's collection itself and the process of response that is so interesting to me, with each of Lily's responses feeling like a conversation. Each spread a collaboration between a pair of unbeknownst artists, each spread exploring a different aspect of Lily’s vast visual language.
Read Lily Hollywell’s article on Rosa Sawyers’ work HERE.
