Tracey Holland
Born: Birmingham 1961. Nationality: British.
Holland currently lives and works in Sheffield. Her practice makes use of photography, video and film in an imaginative, non-conventional way, creating assemblages of still or moving images exploring complex ideas. Equally important in her work is a substantial collection of found objects – old glass bottles, animal bones, snake skins, rusty keys and dead birds among them – which through ingenious lighting and the use of various glass filters she transforms into poetic narrative images. Decay and metamorphosis have featured in some series of prints or installations which, however, offer images of great subtlety and beauty. Other works have explored the relationship between myth and reality using novel twists on the stories of the Brother Grimm to reveal hidden elements underlying conventional moral codes.
Holland’s first solo exhibition was mounted in Cambridge in 1989 and since then has been regularly shown at galleries throughout the UK; examples have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Arts Council, the Wellcome Trust, East Midlands Arts, West Midlands Arts, Hertfordshire County Council, Leicestershire County Council, Humberside County Council, the University of Staffordshire, the University of Nottingham Djanogly Gallery and the University of York St Johns, as well as Warwick.
The photographs shown on the following six pages are from Holland’s 'Vessel' series in which she assembles images of diverse found objects and other organic matter sandwiched between sheets of glass and translucent beeswax.