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 scrutinized through the eyes 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.

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

The Embassy Cultural House (ECH) is located in London, Ontario, Canada 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. The ECH strives to create meaningful relationships between the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and our contributors. The ECH honours the stewardship of the many Indigenous peoples who have resided on these lands since time immemorial.