Holly English

Banner Image: Kittie State - installation view - cardboard, cat litter, various rocks and minerals, water, glasses, brown tape, computer paper, 2020

Holly English is an interdisciplinary artist working in text, installation, performance, horticulture, hospitality and film. Her interest is in the systems and structures that govern our actions and desires. The economy, human supremacy, work and UK politics are scrutinised through the eye of an amateur nature enthusiast.

Holly’s practice exists via a performative persona which operates somewhere between a frazzled mother figure and an assertive small child. Carrying out her work with great diligence, there is a tongue in cheek self-affirmation in her naive attempts to be a better earth member.

Holly completed her MA at Chelsea College of Art in 2020. Her work has been shown at Saatchi Gallery London and as part of ‘Constructing Landscapes/Building Worlds’ at Late at Tate Britain Online. She was a guest artist at TABA symposium for Circular Design and at Culture Reset ‘Art and Money’ online.

Holly is an active studio member at SVA in Gloucestershire, UK where she currently lives and works, initiating and participating in numerous community projects, while regularly exhibiting in the gallery.

She is co-founder of The Last Cochineal alongside Olivia Mossuto - a community researching mutuality and consumption and home to the TRANS TEMPORAL SUPPER CLUB, and is co-author of the ‘Potato Money’ initiative. For more information, you can visit her website here.

Work by Holly English

Untitled nest portrait - nurturing a potato through the season - soil, grass clumps, potato, metal stand, marigolds, stick, paper, 2020

Axomamma from Holly English on Vimeo.

'now imagine you are old and a friend is brushing your hair' - installation view - grass seed, cardboard, bread, projection, soil, potato, computer paper - project in collaboration with Eva Brá Barkardóttir at John Street gallery, SVA, 2020

Image from bar Mutualitea - closing event for 'now imagine you are old and a friend is brushing your hair' at John Street gallery, SVA, 2020

Image from 'and so now we will sit on the rocks and drink in grey liquid' - bar in the fire escape, election night 2019

Image from 'maybe spring will never come' - experimental dinner in collaboration with Olivia Mossuto, 2020

still from 'Homeostasis' single-channel video, 24:00 min - record of daily ritual from the 1st UK lockdown, painting the sun out of my studio, 2020

HOMEOSTASIS from Holly English on Vimeo.

EDITORIAL TEAM

CURATORIAL ADVISORS
Jamelie Hassan & Ron Benner

ADVISORY CIRCLE
Samer Abdelnour, Wyn Geleynse, Fern Helfand, S F Ho, Lorraine Klaasen, Judith Rodger, Ruth Skinner, Mary Lou and Dan Smoke,  and Lucas Stenning

COORDINATING EDITOR
Tariq Hassan Gordon

ASSISTANT COORDINATING EDITOR
Olivia Mossuto

WEB DESIGN & SOCIAL MEDIA
Matthew Dawkins, Tariq Hassan Gordon, Olivia Mossuto, Niloufar Salimi, &  Jade Williamson

VIRTUAL TOURS
Andreas Buchwaldt

PRINT PUBLICATIONS
Shelley Kopp, Olivia Mossuto

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Andreas Buchwaldt, Matthew Dawkins,  Ira Kazi, Shelley Kopp, Niloufar Salimi,  Jenna Rose Sands, &  Michelle Wilson,

PAST CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Charlotte Egan,, Mackenzie Smith, &  Jade Williamson

OUR STORY

Artists Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner and jazz musician Eric Stach founded the Embassy Cultural House (1983-1990) located in the restaurant portion of the Embassy Hotel at 732 Dundas Street in East London. Other former members of the board were: Debrann Eastabrook, Henry Eastabrook, Sharron Forrest, Wyn Geleynse, Janice Gurney, Jean Hay (1929 - 2008), Doug Mitchell, Kim Moodie, Gerard Pas, Peter Rist, Wanda Sawicki, Jean Spence and Jennie White. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Embassy Cultural House was re-envisioned as a virtual artist-run space and website.

This project is supported by the London Arts Council through the City of London's Community Arts Investment Program:

Thank you to our partners

E M B A S S Y C U L T U R A L H O U S E . C A

London, Ontario is on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Attawandaron and Huron-Wendat peoples, at the forks of Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River), an area subject to the Dish with One Spoon Wampum and other treaties.