https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/text daily 0.75 2025-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1653131658283-9D3VZ27DXLLWN27L4XY0/Morley+Cover+v5.jpg Art writing - A cigar is never just a cigar published in Morley Morley Ed. Scott Mason and featuring Timothy Thornton, Pavel Büchler, Fabiola Iza, Linda Kemp, Holly Stevenson, Daniel Sean Kelly, Richard Law and Charu Vallabhbhai "The Morley brand of fictional cigarettes have appeared in film and TV productions since the 1960s. With their distinctive, strangely familiar packaging, Morleys have latterly become a fans’ in-joke, a symbol of knowing deception, a fiction within fictions, an artwork within artworks. For this volume, writers, poets, artists and theorists responded to the Morley fiction, through works that consider the packet, the deep breath and the temporal break afforded by the disappearing ritual of cigarette smoking." A5, 44 pages, Single colour printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, Ed. of 100, 2022 Published by Renaro for Two Queens ISBN 978-0-9929838-3-3 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1653131658283-9D3VZ27DXLLWN27L4XY0/Morley+Cover+v5.jpg Art writing - A cigar is never just a cigar published in Morley Morley Ed. Scott Mason and featuring Timothy Thornton, Pavel Büchler, Fabiola Iza, Linda Kemp, Holly Stevenson, Daniel Sean Kelly, Richard Law and Charu Vallabhbhai "The Morley brand of fictional cigarettes have appeared in film and TV productions since the 1960s. With their distinctive, strangely familiar packaging, Morleys have latterly become a fans’ in-joke, a symbol of knowing deception, a fiction within fictions, an artwork within artworks. For this volume, writers, poets, artists and theorists responded to the Morley fiction, through works that consider the packet, the deep breath and the temporal break afforded by the disappearing ritual of cigarette smoking." A5, 44 pages, Single colour printing, Saddle stitched, Softcover, Ed. of 100, 2022 Published by Renaro for Two Queens ISBN 978-0-9929838-3-3 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1653132831072-IICGYAJDSONLSH29ASU9/image-asset.jpeg Art writing - Neo-Truth Work published in OF A FINAL ACCOUNT IN FORMATION A publication by Scott Mason, containing 11 responses by artists/writers to sonic documentation recorded as part of Mason's exhibition at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes in 2014 Ed. Scott Mason, contributors, Ami Clarke, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Chris Kraus, Harry Burke, Holly Stevenson, John Hill, Lisa Radon and Marti Manen Published by Renaro ISBN-10: 0992983819 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1653821003089-67P0YP3DVFSW2QZ2V6HQ/image-asset.png Art writing - Wait Like Penelope Wait Like Penelope a pamphlet essay written for The Waiting Place (2021) curated by Ann-Marie James & Emily Godden, The Art Station, Saxmundham, UK Virtual exhibition Contributions from: Henny Acloque, Bench Allen, Eilidh Allen, Ralph Anderson , Nigel Ball, Helen Barff, SE Barnet, Jordan Baseman, Katriona Beales, Jacq Bebb, Emilia Bergmark , Francesca Blomfield, Carla Borel, Matt Bowman, Sarah Bradley, Elinor Brass, Adam Bridgland, Elaine Brown, Rebecca Byrne, Perienne Christian, Veronique Christie, Max Clements, Lucienne Cole, Ham Darroch , Karen David, Jeff Dennis, Lauren Doughty, Annabel Dover, Sean Edwards, Liz Elton, Geraint Evans, Hannah Farthing, Dorothy Feaver, Stephen Feeke, Louise Fitzjohn & Liminal Gallery, Edwina Fitzpatrick, Nina Mae Fowler, Ryan Gander, Genevieve Gaunt, Tom Gidley, Mike Goddard, Emily Godden, Katie Goodwin, Alastair Gordon, Fiona Grady, Rahila Gupta, Isobella Hall, Rachael House, Hannah Hughes, Rowena Hughes, Ann-Marie James, Callum John, James Kessell, Paul Kindersley, William Kingett, Sharon Kivland, Sarah Kogan, Abigail Lane, Lana Locke, Anna Mac, Alexander Massouras, Justine Moss, Julia Muggenburg, Andrew Nairne, Clare Palmier, Elizabeth Pawle, Alex Pearl, Charley Peters, Naomi Polonsky, Katie Pratt, Phoebe Pryor, Emilie Pugh, Emily Richardson, Philippa Robilliard, Carl Rowe, Tim A Shaw, Michaela Shorb, Hannah Stageman, Holly Stevenson, Srin Surti, Adam Thompson, Maria Thurn Und Taxis, Elgin Thwaites, Cassie Vaughan, Marius Von Brasch, Arimathea Warren, Jane Watt, Emily Webb, Mathew Weir, Alice Wilson, Jess Wilson, Sarah Kate Wilson, Calvin Winner, Alison Wilding, Robyn Woolston. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595676666880-VH5YOVTOOZ7DSZ6QAM3O/Writing5.jpg Art writing - Neo - Truth Work published in of a final account in formation by Scott Masson Neo - Truth Work a commissioned fiction published in of a final account in formation by Scott Mason: Published by Renaro, 2014, on the occasion of the poet’s show at the MK Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9929838-1-9 Good Press https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595798198657-M0DM9139ZBW5TO94SW9K/image-asset.jpeg Art writing - Tear to Care Tear to Care Artist’s book of interactive postcards, edition of 20 made for Sharon Kivland Library Interventions exhibition, Leeds. Published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE ISBN 978-1-908452-31-3 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595796631560-TK60DVLG9MQ2GMW3ROZ4/image-asset.jpeg Art writing - Worse than Usual Worse than Usual an essay on the politics of smiling written for Invasion Manual, an exhibition curated by Anna Salmane and P.Mulligan, supported by the Lativian State Capital Foundation and distributed around London. Participating artists: Klāvs Kurpnieks (LV), Anna Salmane (LV), Krišs Salmanis (LV), Monika Srodon (PL), Muriel Baumgartner (CH), Davide Fensi (IT), P Mulligan (UK), Chris Ratcliffe (UK), Holly Stevenson (UK), Emma Wood (UK) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595790413168-X2Z1TPZH1DMYFITPVZWG/Writing2.jpg Art writing - A History of Getting Smashed published in Sex, Death & Cocktails Sharon Kivland, Alasdair Duncan and Holly Stevenson Sex, Death & Cocktails, AND Public, 2013, Art Lacuna Edition: ISBN 978-1-908452-31-3 https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/waiting-room-exhibition daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595491231994-I3PJI0O4V21B2N5UXNZQ/%C2%A9+2Holly_Stevenson.jpg Waiting Room - WAITING ROOM, Wimbledon Space, Curated by Karen David https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595491231994-I3PJI0O4V21B2N5UXNZQ/%C2%A9+2Holly_Stevenson.jpg Waiting Room - WAITING ROOM, Wimbledon Space, Curated by Karen David https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595491237411-FCW65HD49GRXX4QRD5N5/%C2%A9+3Holly_Stevenson.jpg Waiting Room - Trail https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595491221057-1CNYVMRSZ0FRGN26EX8C/%C2%A9+1Holly_Stevenson.jpg Waiting Room - She’s Unstubbable https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/cubitt-gallery daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595502350604-642RFH4594710HRSKTID/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-Cubit-025.jpg Structures that cooperate: Get Paid! - STRUCTURES THAT CO-OPERATE GET PAID! Cubitt Gallery, London, curated by Louise Shelly. Structures That Cooperate reopens for 2019 with a second configuration of the space designed by Mexico City-based artist Clemence Seilles. It will host newly installed work in the gallery and an ongoing public programme under the title Get Paid! Structures That Cooperate: Get Paid! presents artworks, events and projects operating with politicised models of economy and organisation. These include Cultural Capital Cooperative Object #2 (CCCO#2) a cooperatively produced and owned film by artists Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O’Neill, and Patrick Staff amplified by the Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S) installed alongside works from the Ceramics Studio Co-op, London. In continuation of a format established in October, where Cubitt’s gallery is used for an extended schedule of events, commissions, research and exhibitions, Get Paid! will present work across several formats and timeframes For a 12-month period Cubitt will be licensing the CCCO#2 film as a process of dialogue and support of the Cultural Capital Cooperative group. CCCO#2 will be installed in the gallery for Get Paid! inviting Black Obsidian Sound System to amplify the sound of the film for the opening night. Black Obsidian Sound System is a collectively made and owned sound system established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. After CCCO#2’s public installation in the gallery, the film will be available to view at Cubitt by appointment until December 2019, alongside a template of the CCC license agreement. This agreement will be made available as a free download from the Cubitt website as a resource for others, to be adapted and used in support of future cooperative art production. Into this context, Get Paid! invites another cooperative, Ceramics Studio Co-op an artist-run worker co-operative in south London. Ceramics Studio Co-op will present a selection of works for sale by its members and, as part of a longer term conversation, are working with The Voice of Domestic Workers towards the production of a new collaborative ceramic work for sale later in 2019. Ceramics Studio Co-op members who will be showing work in the gallery include: Fredrik Andersson, Anna Baskakova, Tatiana Baskakova, Lenka Kalafutová, Sandra Lane, Tristan Lathey, Holly Stevenson. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595502350604-642RFH4594710HRSKTID/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-Cubit-025.jpg Structures that cooperate: Get Paid! - STRUCTURES THAT CO-OPERATE GET PAID! Cubitt Gallery, London, curated by Louise Shelly. Structures That Cooperate reopens for 2019 with a second configuration of the space designed by Mexico City-based artist Clemence Seilles. It will host newly installed work in the gallery and an ongoing public programme under the title Get Paid! Structures That Cooperate: Get Paid! presents artworks, events and projects operating with politicised models of economy and organisation. These include Cultural Capital Cooperative Object #2 (CCCO#2) a cooperatively produced and owned film by artists Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O’Neill, and Patrick Staff amplified by the Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S) installed alongside works from the Ceramics Studio Co-op, London. In continuation of a format established in October, where Cubitt’s gallery is used for an extended schedule of events, commissions, research and exhibitions, Get Paid! will present work across several formats and timeframes For a 12-month period Cubitt will be licensing the CCCO#2 film as a process of dialogue and support of the Cultural Capital Cooperative group. CCCO#2 will be installed in the gallery for Get Paid! inviting Black Obsidian Sound System to amplify the sound of the film for the opening night. Black Obsidian Sound System is a collectively made and owned sound system established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. After CCCO#2’s public installation in the gallery, the film will be available to view at Cubitt by appointment until December 2019, alongside a template of the CCC license agreement. This agreement will be made available as a free download from the Cubitt website as a resource for others, to be adapted and used in support of future cooperative art production. Into this context, Get Paid! invites another cooperative, Ceramics Studio Co-op an artist-run worker co-operative in south London. Ceramics Studio Co-op will present a selection of works for sale by its members and, as part of a longer term conversation, are working with The Voice of Domestic Workers towards the production of a new collaborative ceramic work for sale later in 2019. Ceramics Studio Co-op members who will be showing work in the gallery include: Fredrik Andersson, Anna Baskakova, Tatiana Baskakova, Lenka Kalafutová, Sandra Lane, Tristan Lathey, Holly Stevenson. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595501912993-GO0D73NLP0RJRMUNPIWE/image-asset.jpeg Structures that cooperate: Get Paid! - Monster STRUCTURES THAT CO-OPERATE GET PAID! Cubitt Gallery, London, curated by Louise Shelly. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595502333394-BNO63L8CA8XLW4Z61A9M/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-Cubit-010.jpg Structures that cooperate: Get Paid! - Vagina-na-na https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595502362846-F900VENFN5RKWIJ59RGS/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-Cubit-005.jpg Structures that cooperate: Get Paid! - She's Unstubbable https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/ma-degree-show daily 0.75 2023-12-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595792522767-1O4PNAIV48DENPPR0SVM/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-DegreeShow1.jpg MA Degree Show - Vinyl Venus with Male Pulp I and Female Pulp II Chelsea College of Art and Design MA Degree Show 2011, Barbican Creative Cities 2012 Collage: Vinyl cut-outs, paper pulp, and magazine cut-outs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595792522767-1O4PNAIV48DENPPR0SVM/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-DegreeShow1.jpg MA Degree Show - Vinyl Venus with Male Pulp I and Female Pulp II Chelsea College of Art and Design MA Degree Show 2011, Barbican Creative Cities 2012 Collage: Vinyl cut-outs, paper pulp, and magazine cut-outs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595795240838-MCMDDC05RVOHNAKW6NI6/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-DegreeShow+Freud%27s-Doctor2.jpg MA Degree Show - Male Pulp I, Female Pulp II, Freud's Doctor and Twig Man https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595792974552-0IE37UAIG7K92NS5FF8R/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-MAShow-Freud%27sDoctor.jpg MA Degree Show - Freud's Doctor https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595792859544-F2MCXGQPA5F0PCNLBCC0/%C2%A9Holly-Stevenson-MAShow-Lovers.jpg MA Degree Show - Lovers Oak and pear wood https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1595795531342-UFPV85N6DYIR6MZYAMKV/image-asset.jpeg MA Degree Show - Lovers, Pulp Parts and Feel Me https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/procreate-project-new-commission daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391026524-HS1PP4CC9AI7GBX5787Z/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Medusa_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - What Does It Mean To Mother? A new body of work made with a New Commission award from Procreate Project and funded by the Arts Council, England. “Through the process of art making, and informed by the collective responses gathered from a group of mother artists with materially driven practices, Holly will investigate ‘What does it mean to mother?’ With a profound interest in psychoanalysis, the artist aims to offer interpretations and a view on the different experiences of mothering considering and questioning the idea of the ‘good enough mother’, first coined in 1953 by paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Resulting in a series of ceramic sculptures, Holly will glean language and forms that relate art making to mothering and mothering to art making, choosing the material of ‘clay’ as meaning for nurturing, labour intensive and unpredictable practices.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391026524-HS1PP4CC9AI7GBX5787Z/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Medusa_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - What Does It Mean To Mother? A new body of work made with a New Commission award from Procreate Project and funded by the Arts Council, England. “Through the process of art making, and informed by the collective responses gathered from a group of mother artists with materially driven practices, Holly will investigate ‘What does it mean to mother?’ With a profound interest in psychoanalysis, the artist aims to offer interpretations and a view on the different experiences of mothering considering and questioning the idea of the ‘good enough mother’, first coined in 1953 by paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Resulting in a series of ceramic sculptures, Holly will glean language and forms that relate art making to mothering and mothering to art making, choosing the material of ‘clay’ as meaning for nurturing, labour intensive and unpredictable practices.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391030728-VD5K8S1OXV092LYT9UEE/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Medusa_3.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Medusa (A readymade monster) (2020) Glazed ceramic, 26 x 21 x 18 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391033689-5WSQIYUUS5BO409MSZ5E/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Medusa_5.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391034144-44VSAH7AO9FF6TZR4F76/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Medusa_6.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391223922-6X6JKHCLB6O93ADVBOCF/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Eyes_In_The_Back_Of_Her_Head_2.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Eyes in the back of her head (2020) Glazed ceramic, 30 x 23 x 26 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391229883-OBTITEJRYZGNGQIV6I2L/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Eyes_In_The_Back_Of_Her_Head_3.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391235187-1E85U20NK8ZE26KHLAJ6/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Eyes_In_The_Back_Of_Her_Head_4.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391237954-7N4SAT611XSNCM65KAJ2/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Eyes_In_The_Back_Of_Her_Head_5.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391362605-VZ98QWND4KCTA275TUQ3/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Green_Fingers_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Green Fingers (2020) Glazed ceramic, vulcan clay and epoxy resin, 40 x 22 x 16 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391370488-Y6WEWXIJ48LGOQ3P2GRM/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Green_Fingers_3.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391403722-5UMI27D15YIQKHZY4DOZ/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Green_Fingers_4.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391462067-HTZVZGG5ACHU8J4B7N37/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Pituitary_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Pituitary (2020) Glazed ceramic, 30 x 18 x 13.5 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391470527-0MHUDKJPGMJETKU0ABB4/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Pituitary_3.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391473434-QQPS2XGI2UTL1ISNGTP7/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Pituitary_4.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391502268-AZC7401VVSUQXC7Q4IG9/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_What%27s_For_Dinner_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - What's For Dinner? (2020) Glazed ceramic, 32 x 16 x 15 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391505011-R63G2KOT7HZO1SM5NXNG/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_What%27s_For_Dinner_2.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391507996-Q5NGT2WWIMEILQ3FQQBC/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_What%27s_For_Dinner_3.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391538794-GAFIXOAV5V9V4Z63467M/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Playing_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Playing (2020) Glazed ceramic, 40 x 19 x 16 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391543961-SJ0U37TH0QG6N0F97IIG/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Playing_2.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391548889-WZUVMBU4QJBW6KFPVI2H/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Playing_4.jpg New Commission Procreate Project https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391685052-5PRIBXR3E2TOU25Q76XW/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_1_2.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 1 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 22 x 11 x 11.5 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391694679-ZTG96VYBLJNY7L9KALNM/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_2_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 2 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 22 x 8 x 12 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391718848-818RNAOLZWE96O3IZEG1/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_3_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 3 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 17 x 9 x 12 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391723055-3DI3RW961YIR9U92A231/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_4_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 4 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 14 x 9 x 11 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391726452-TOMV35S08VCRFIGLVW3Q/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_5_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 5 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 21 x 11 x 12 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391761693-LUFTJNPZ325AU5K54QYX/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_6_1.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal 6 (2020) Glazed ceramic, 15 x 14 x 14 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1601391611779-D293TD4GF7CFN1KGRLOF/%C2%A9H_Stevenson_Nocturnal_1-6.jpg New Commission Procreate Project - Nocturnal Series 1 - 6 (2020) Glazed ceramic, dimensions variable https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/reading-between-the-lines daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822728566-BZ0TSIH5R0OF5QWEU8IA/TBB_8283.jpg Reading Between the Lines - Reading Between the Lines | Holly Stevenson, Sid Motion Gallery, London Photography Tim Bowditch https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822728566-BZ0TSIH5R0OF5QWEU8IA/TBB_8283.jpg Reading Between the Lines - Reading Between the Lines | Holly Stevenson, Sid Motion Gallery, London Photography Tim Bowditch https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822849648-G0KMSVAPHXY8E1UALI9Z/TBB_8311.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/6164688ce73b941625218612/61646908d8dff343f3aa0d45/1633970440236/ Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822301652-0FKPVF3LIDQAG6E6ZN52/TBB_8233.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822326374-IEEMQU5V44J2WM2HXWS1/TBB_8231.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822350014-HSY7FCD7ZR1S5B952GGG/TBB_8266.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822365707-J8LGL1GPSTLYYMBDZWN0/TBB_8269.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822466170-RCPWZG1MBXQW83OMJFVT/TBB_8229.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822482678-O13W6UJYPQ2TQ9F3ZA9Z/TBB_8276.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822279111-LLWNMMZIA247ATQY2WN7/TBB_8257-HDR.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1636822528576-EQWN11HF10QK5TCB2JP2/TBB_8278.jpg Reading Between the Lines Reading Between the Lines Exhibition text by Matthew Bowman, September 2021 Notwithstanding the famous psychoanalytic caution apocryphally attributed to Sigmund Freud—that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, the phallic connotations of cigarettes, cigars, and pipes have long been construed since the 1920s. It’s tempting to imagine, though, that Freud might have warned against possible hermeneutic overreach: not only because misinterpretations risk denting the putative scientificity of psychoanalysis, but also because sitting there in his office in Vienna and later in London, the notoriously inveterate smoker Freud might have found any supposition that the cigar in his mouth was a displaced penis rather near the knuckle. However, if he did, for a moment, consider the possibility of the cigar as a phallic object, he might have paused for a second or two when he noticed his favourite ashtray into which he stubbed-out his cigars and hence speculated upon the psychoanalytical resonances that followed. Such a scenario comprises the groundwork for Holly Stevenson’s ceramic sculptures. Taking as a basis Freud’s much-used ashtray and the cigars residing there, she recodes or unveils them as effectively phallic and vulvic symbols. Bathers is a good introduction to Stevenson’s procedures insofar as the ashtray is eminently recognizable as ashtray while the cigars visibly transmute into grotesque small heads with tongues as penises. Phallic imagery, however, is largely disempowered in these works: the multitude of cigarettes are redolent of broken, discarded penises—disjecta membra— which, of course, is what they are: each piece of ash tapped into the ashtray testifies to phallic diminishment. By contrast, the ashtray elements appear correspondingly “whole,” thereby troubling the customary psychoanalytic theorization of woman as castrated, defined by “lack.” Love Bomb particularly embodies—the verb is pertinent— a strikingly feminine virility, even if speaking in terms of a strict opposition between male and female is made problematic by these works. Of all the works exhibited, Freud would have immediately recognised Manu Fica and Woodcutter and perhaps even viewed them jointly as an interpretative skeleton key. Atop the first of these is a flesh-coloured hand; protruding through its index and third fingers is a vastly elongated and thoroughly phallic thumb. This gesture is called “manu fica” (hence the work’s title) meaning “fig in hand” but also possesses more obscene resonances, functioning as a symbol like “up yours” and colloquially as “hand in vagina.” While the gesture remains in use today, with varying meanings, erotic and playful, its origins date back at least two thousand years. The Romans, for example, made sculptural versions of it, utilizing the symbol’s obscene characteristics in order to ward off the evil eye. Stevenson’s own rendering exemplifies the erotic denotations and connotations through comic exaggeration. In his collection, Freud owned a Roman amulet based on or resembling the manu fica symbol (reference 3392 in the Freud collection). Freud’s own interest in this object corresponded with his regard for Richard Payne Knight’s 1786 book A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus that charted the history of phallic worship that had a supposed outcome—actually, a misinterpretation according to Knight—in an unusual Catholic ritual involving wax penis votives being offered by women in supplication. Knight’s book derived, in part, from research conducted by the British ambassador William Hamilton, who had collected five of these votives in 1781 and was similarly struck by the manu fica amulets worn by women in Naples. Freud refers to Knight’s book in his infamous essay on Leonard da Vinci and the amulet he collected is the model for the similarly flesh-coloured phallus and ring that comprises the top-most section of Stevenson’s Woodcutter. The point is not about conferring value upon Stevenson’s work via any legitimacy proffered by ancient lineages. On the contrary, what is crucial here is that rather than backward looking, Manu Fica and the other works propels the past forward as part of the present’s accretions, thereby scrambling all temporal coordinates. Although Freud is popularly known as the great thinker of the psychosexual determinants of the human mind, actually underpinning his reflections was a persistent endeavour to grasp the productive effects of an incessantly displacing set of relations amid past, present, and future—memory and fantasy—both at the level of the individual and intergenerationally; that is to say, in Freud’s parlance, ontogentically and phylogenetically. Studying and collecting antiquities, changing his office into his own personal cabinet of curiosities, served as a foundation for envisaging the phylogenetic conditions of subjecthood. Ontogeny and phylogeny are thus combined in Stevenson’s work: ancient phallic symbolism woven with Stevenson’s own personal memories; the striped patterns abundantly present throughout the sculptures derive from recollections of her childhood bedsheets. For Freud, as well as for Carl Jung, the particular and the universal polarity evident here need not be comprehended as an absolute binary opposition. Our local circumstances are always plugged into, and intimate with, what transcends the self in the here and now in such a way that the particular is incorporated into the universal rather than positioned as its antithesis. A result following from this cast of mind is also the deliberate confusion between gender differences at the level of symbolic construction. Penises and vulvic forms interpenetrate on a single vessel, sometimes ambiguously but always playfully. Woodcutter is possibly the most overtly bigendered instance here. Corollary to this, such interpenetration generates a multiplicity of physiological couplings: mouths becoming vulvas, teeth suggesting vagina dentata, eyes protruding between red lips, penises pushing out from inside mouths. Given the categorical unfixity happening, it is only too appropriate that Stevenson deploys clay and glaze, mediums defined by malleability and fluidity. Sure, the kiln firings will halt that malleability and fluidity, but Stevenson’s work halts them at the pinnacle of unfixity. We can imagine, then, Stevenson’s works occupying spaces in Freud’s office or that office transferred into and as Sid Motion’s gallery. Not entirely comfortably, to be sure, insofar as Freud’s aesthetics tastes mostly did not extend to the art contemporaneous with him. He generally suspected Surrealism, for example, of having little truck with his notion of the unconscious despite its professions. But Freud might likely also have been unsettled by the overturning of gender hierarchies. Yet such discomfiture results from an implicit recognition that such possibilities were already unconsciously conceived by him, as if Stevenson’s ceramic pieces were subjecting Freud to psychoanalysis. It was on a similar basis that many feminists sought to radicalize Freud’s insights rather than marginalize them. Stevenson, in that respect, with her contemporary grotesques, delightfully contributes a further way to read Freud between the lines. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1654336771149-NGBH497OLDYZAA3F1U9W/TBB_8329+copy.jpg Reading Between the Lines https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/another-mother-public-sculpture daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952606281-Y6LX7J6S1AAR5WX3TAF8/C1090150.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER - ANOTHER MOTHER | the CoLAB Temple The Artist’s Garden, Temple Station Roof Terrace, Temple Place, London WC2R 2PH Open daily from dawn to dusk, free and open to all. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952606281-Y6LX7J6S1AAR5WX3TAF8/C1090150.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER - ANOTHER MOTHER | the CoLAB Temple The Artist’s Garden, Temple Station Roof Terrace, Temple Place, London WC2R 2PH Open daily from dawn to dusk, free and open to all. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952599902-SWCGE7BQ85BK82G14J95/C1090079.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952596493-M3A68Q1LPFE9IXKP4GOB/C1090032.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647719132693-HHX0L6NMNQ3BPHIRKXDS/C1090020.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952597379-ZVH4OLWIH13ASAUNGQ1R/C1090063.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952599951-95PDFRN9HNF6DUD0GOAQ/C1090083.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952591921-RVFL4YZZ84BWCFXHVSUV/C1090023.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1647952572992-E834CVU35P370DPF2F1L/C1090014.jpg ANOTHER MOTHER PRESS RELEASE Holly Stevenson | Another Mother The Artist’s Garden | 15 March 2022 – ongoing theCoLAB Temple is pleased to present Holly Stevenson’s first public sculpture Another Mother, which now adorns the balustrade that tops the vast half-acre raised space above Temple tube station, that is the Artist’s Garden: a newly created public open space for contemporary sculptural interventions. Stevenson’s work is the most recent addition to a cumulative exhibition featuring Lakwena’s vibrant vision of Paradise, Back in the Air: a Meditation on Higher Ground overseen by Camilla Bliss’s guardian vessels Marshmallow Dew, and its counterpart Fingery Eyes. Stevenson was first drawn to the romanticism of decay and neglect evident in the structure of Temple Station roof terrace and in particular, its balustrade with its missing balusters. Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the great Victorian engineer, who masterminded the construction of London’s sewage system and saved London from cholera and the ‘great stink’ by constructing the Embankment and Temple roof terrace in c.1865, is rightly celebrated in a monument on the Embankment nearby. But what of those who are always missing from the stories of great men: the wives, mothers and women? Given that of the 1500 statues in London only 50 name specific women, Stevenson saw a space to celebrate the untold, invisible, unpaid but essential support roles of women across the world and throughout history. The balusters’ curvaceous fecund form (meaning ‘pomegranate flower’) is womanly, they are many, they look the same, they carry out their essential work together, silently, invisibly. The monotonous rhythm of the balustrade tells the story of the repetitive grind of womanhood and motherhood. That rhythm carries the viewer around the perimeter of the Artist’s Garden until it stops: to contemplate a subtle shrine in the form of Another Mother. This robust ceramic work is an ode to Maria Kough Bazalgette (1819 – 1902), who gave birth to 11 children in 15 years, all of which survived into middle age and beyond with one exception. Stevenson’s replacement baluster is a surreal tribute to Maria, who is will go down in history as just Another Mother. Although it hints at the bow in her hair from an early photograph and is adorned with flowers representing her children, it is not a portrait. Taking the form of a caryatid, a sculpted female form used in architecture to decoratively hold up the parapet, it is a semi-abstract shrine to all unsung women. In the zeitgeist, the sculpture is crowned with a concave blue sky with yellow stars, only visible from street level, a tonal nod to women and children forced to flee male oppression. Stevenson’s Another Mother does not dominate, it does not shout. She was spurred on by a desire to maintain, to improve the neglected perimeter of the site with subtle force. Influenced by the important work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose performances and manifestos took domestic/women’s work (such as scrubbing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum of Art in Connecticut, USA) and turned them into what she called ‘Maintenance Art’, an important form of civic or public art. Like Ukeles’, Stevenson’s maintenance work is set to be of long duration, as she embarks on her residency in the Artist’s Hut kept company by a quarrelling family of her sculptures sitting on a garden bench watching her explore what it means to be a baluster and what it means to be a woman. About theCoLAB theCoLAB collaborates with inventiveness creating opportunities for artists to use unusual sites as experimental laboratories to realise their most life-affirming work. Operating beyond the confines of the white cube since 2011, theCoLAB conceives and realises its large scale, long term, complex artistic interventions to change the way we perceive, experience and understand the interrelation of space, place, concept and sculpture. About the Artist’s Garden Launched in October 2021 on the site of Lord Arundel’s seventeenth century garden and Bazalgette’s Embankment, the Artist’s Garden is a 1400sqm overlooked public space which has become a site for large scale artistic interventions and the Women’s Work exhibition/residency programme, giving female artists opportunities to show work outdoors and in the specially constructed Artist’s Hut. In partnership with Westminster City Council, WSP and with kind permission of TfL. About Holly Stevenson Stevenson’s fluid ceramic forms explore Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray and last cigar as a bodily metaphor. Her ceramic sculpture diligently embodies the ashtray and cigar as though they were two gendered male and female forms as the artist reconfigures them into a clay language of her own. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1666882022998-MCUVARFA2DZSUW6DN2HY/image-asset.jpeg ANOTHER MOTHER - The Artist's Garden Residency https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/bornfromearth daily 0.75 2022-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481617837-3HFTXWURT9WFLFQNBJKZ/Born+From+Earth+installation+%2813%29+%282000px%29.jpg Born From Earth - BORN FROM EARTH | Richard Saltoun Gallery London Richard Saltoun Gallery presents an all-women group show bringing together ceramics by 11 contemporary artists, from pioneers of the medium to young artists who keep pushing it forward. The exhibition features a bespoke display designed by Lisa Chan, founder of London-based creative studio It’s a Local Collective, which will transform the gallery in an earthen landscape striking a dialogue between art and architecture. The display is realised with the support of MALIN+GOETZ. To accompany the exhibition, Chan and Chinese contemporary artist Yushi Li will deliver an educational programme of talks and events in collaboration with the Architectural Association, where they are both tutors. The aim is to explore possibilities and responsibilities of architectural practice while making the research process more accessible and inclusive. From Rose English’s colourful porcelain dancers and Judy Chicago’s erotic cookies to Florence Peake’s materic sculptures and Shelagh Wakely’s delicate unfired clay installations, Ceramics is a celebration of the endless possibilities offered by this medium and how it can be shaped into radically different forms by the artists’ unique sensibilities. Some of the artists in the exhibition pioneered the use of ceramics in art making. It’s the case of Belgian artist Jacqueline Poncelet (b. 1947), whose sculptural works in ceramics became associated with the New British Sculpture movement led by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon (to whom she was married at that time), Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow. Ceramics includes three sculptures by Poncelet, which were all exhibited as part of the artist’s major solo show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1985. Belgian artist Carmen Dionyse (1921–2013) - shown for the first time in the UK - and British modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009) also specialised in ceramics. In her practice, Dionyse responded with originality to ancient stories and cultural rites and rituals. She is known for her sculptural busts and masks that drew inspiration from and were sometimes named after Biblical and Greek mythological figures. Duckworth produced abstract works that defined new ways of thinking about ceramics in the second half of the 20th century, Carol McNicoll (b. 1943) was part of a radical group of artists that transformed the British ceramics scene in the late 1970s by re-establishing the vessel as an abstract form. Together they paved the way for a new generation of artists approaching ceramics with a fresh outlook, like Gaia Fugazza (b. 1985) and Holly Stevenson (b.1975). Stevenson has developed a figurative language of her own. Often using ovular forms to represent the female and cylindrical phallic shapes to represent the male, her surrealist vessels explore issues of gender and femininity. Ceramics hold a central place in the multidisciplinary practice of feminist artists Florence Peake (b. 1973) and Judy Chicago (b.1939). Peake for example is mainly known for her performances exploring notions of materiality and physicality, but she often uses ceramics as props. On the other hand, Chicago’s most famous work, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), is a monumental triangular table with ceramics plates dedicated to notable women in history. Chicago’s Six Erotic Cookies (1967) on view at Richard Saltoun Gallery was part of her solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center for Feminist Art, New York, in 2014. The bespoke exhibition design by Lisa Chan is an interactive space where art & architecture are in dialogue. A 13m long earthen landscape unfurls along the gallery as a poetic and immersive gesture guiding visitors through the exhibition. Made from natural earth and lime, the curated journey focuses on a biophilic design that eases visitors’ minds and enriches their wellbeing. The aggregate landscape playfully houses ceramics, earthen seats, and a table for conversations, research, and public events. Photographer Ben Westoby, images courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery London and Rome. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481617837-3HFTXWURT9WFLFQNBJKZ/Born+From+Earth+installation+%2813%29+%282000px%29.jpg Born From Earth - BORN FROM EARTH | Richard Saltoun Gallery London Richard Saltoun Gallery presents an all-women group show bringing together ceramics by 11 contemporary artists, from pioneers of the medium to young artists who keep pushing it forward. The exhibition features a bespoke display designed by Lisa Chan, founder of London-based creative studio It’s a Local Collective, which will transform the gallery in an earthen landscape striking a dialogue between art and architecture. The display is realised with the support of MALIN+GOETZ. To accompany the exhibition, Chan and Chinese contemporary artist Yushi Li will deliver an educational programme of talks and events in collaboration with the Architectural Association, where they are both tutors. The aim is to explore possibilities and responsibilities of architectural practice while making the research process more accessible and inclusive. From Rose English’s colourful porcelain dancers and Judy Chicago’s erotic cookies to Florence Peake’s materic sculptures and Shelagh Wakely’s delicate unfired clay installations, Ceramics is a celebration of the endless possibilities offered by this medium and how it can be shaped into radically different forms by the artists’ unique sensibilities. Some of the artists in the exhibition pioneered the use of ceramics in art making. It’s the case of Belgian artist Jacqueline Poncelet (b. 1947), whose sculptural works in ceramics became associated with the New British Sculpture movement led by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon (to whom she was married at that time), Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow. Ceramics includes three sculptures by Poncelet, which were all exhibited as part of the artist’s major solo show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1985. Belgian artist Carmen Dionyse (1921–2013) - shown for the first time in the UK - and British modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009) also specialised in ceramics. In her practice, Dionyse responded with originality to ancient stories and cultural rites and rituals. She is known for her sculptural busts and masks that drew inspiration from and were sometimes named after Biblical and Greek mythological figures. Duckworth produced abstract works that defined new ways of thinking about ceramics in the second half of the 20th century, Carol McNicoll (b. 1943) was part of a radical group of artists that transformed the British ceramics scene in the late 1970s by re-establishing the vessel as an abstract form. Together they paved the way for a new generation of artists approaching ceramics with a fresh outlook, like Gaia Fugazza (b. 1985) and Holly Stevenson (b.1975). Stevenson has developed a figurative language of her own. Often using ovular forms to represent the female and cylindrical phallic shapes to represent the male, her surrealist vessels explore issues of gender and femininity. Ceramics hold a central place in the multidisciplinary practice of feminist artists Florence Peake (b. 1973) and Judy Chicago (b.1939). Peake for example is mainly known for her performances exploring notions of materiality and physicality, but she often uses ceramics as props. On the other hand, Chicago’s most famous work, The Dinner Party (1974-1979), is a monumental triangular table with ceramics plates dedicated to notable women in history. Chicago’s Six Erotic Cookies (1967) on view at Richard Saltoun Gallery was part of her solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center for Feminist Art, New York, in 2014. The bespoke exhibition design by Lisa Chan is an interactive space where art & architecture are in dialogue. A 13m long earthen landscape unfurls along the gallery as a poetic and immersive gesture guiding visitors through the exhibition. Made from natural earth and lime, the curated journey focuses on a biophilic design that eases visitors’ minds and enriches their wellbeing. The aggregate landscape playfully houses ceramics, earthen seats, and a table for conversations, research, and public events. Photographer Ben Westoby, images courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery London and Rome. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481637663-1HBR46C2ULBH87OR1O5R/HST008+%28hi-res%29.jpg Born From Earth https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481641224-9HYIXIOTEGZXA0QD09QW/HST009+%28hi-res%29.jpg Born From Earth https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481658013-YU3567JXNJ2YKR1ZMS29/HST011+%28hi-res%29.jpg Born From Earth https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1658481660632-2LGRR0YZYQVP7OFF80OB/HST012+%28hi-res%29.jpg Born From Earth https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/shoppers-shoes-sacks daily 0.75 2023-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822980118-UDAZRCCI6GIEYCYQ7ZMW/Repeat+Steps_2022_Ceramic_+10+x+13+x+21_H_Stevenson.1.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks - Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks | AWITA X JW Anderson | Offsite project Sid Motion Gallery Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks | A game of substitution Being invited to exhibit my work in JW Anderson’s London store, honour aside, felt strangely compelling. How could my ceramic practice talk to the intriguing garments, already works of art in their own right? Personally, I now can’t bear to stitch as I come from a long line of impoverished seamstresses, outfitters and shop keepers. As a child I sewed and embroidered with my Grandmothers, I also played shops with such gusto that all my belongings had price stickers on. For the many objects out of my short-armed reach I endlessly made papier-mâché objects as stand ins. Like the real-life tortoise I so desperately wanted but could never have, I ensured that it repeatedly emerged in paper dollops and poster paint around the home. Gazing at the store’s giant modular windows, they are such a perfect arrangement, I do not want to change a thing but rather artfully join in the game. Games remain important to my psychoanalytic practice. Games are the touchstone where fashion and art meet. Humorously taking the real sense of the word substitution, a favourite psychoanalytic manoeuvre, as if by magic my exhibition positions ceramics in place of the expected garments and accessories. During the making of Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks my forms considered the act of being worn, revealed in the titles, such as I Love this Old Cardigan and Sprung Sleeve. The scale of the swooning shoppers, informed by clay and formed by the figurative vessels, is purposefully not in line with their objects of desire, the shoes and the sacks. All the works have been conceived to sit in harmony with the store’s architecture. In the window they appear to peer out and in turn can be peered at and through. This exhibition’s invite extends to everyone from JW Anderson aficionados to the passer-by. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822980118-UDAZRCCI6GIEYCYQ7ZMW/Repeat+Steps_2022_Ceramic_+10+x+13+x+21_H_Stevenson.1.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks - Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks | AWITA X JW Anderson | Offsite project Sid Motion Gallery Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks | A game of substitution Being invited to exhibit my work in JW Anderson’s London store, honour aside, felt strangely compelling. How could my ceramic practice talk to the intriguing garments, already works of art in their own right? Personally, I now can’t bear to stitch as I come from a long line of impoverished seamstresses, outfitters and shop keepers. As a child I sewed and embroidered with my Grandmothers, I also played shops with such gusto that all my belongings had price stickers on. For the many objects out of my short-armed reach I endlessly made papier-mâché objects as stand ins. Like the real-life tortoise I so desperately wanted but could never have, I ensured that it repeatedly emerged in paper dollops and poster paint around the home. Gazing at the store’s giant modular windows, they are such a perfect arrangement, I do not want to change a thing but rather artfully join in the game. Games remain important to my psychoanalytic practice. Games are the touchstone where fashion and art meet. Humorously taking the real sense of the word substitution, a favourite psychoanalytic manoeuvre, as if by magic my exhibition positions ceramics in place of the expected garments and accessories. During the making of Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks my forms considered the act of being worn, revealed in the titles, such as I Love this Old Cardigan and Sprung Sleeve. The scale of the swooning shoppers, informed by clay and formed by the figurative vessels, is purposefully not in line with their objects of desire, the shoes and the sacks. All the works have been conceived to sit in harmony with the store’s architecture. In the window they appear to peer out and in turn can be peered at and through. This exhibition’s invite extends to everyone from JW Anderson aficionados to the passer-by. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823021125-FLXI7KUIWZO1AUHLJIZG/Shell-eye-ders_+2022_Ceramic_+9+x+10+x+22_+H_Stevenson.1.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822820104-7NP58W7U5BVUV6RK6OH6/L1160986.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823068009-6JPXJYM124DY8R49D0L3/Dear+Flaming+Heart+_+2022_Ceramic_+37+x+20+x+30_+H_Stevenson.3.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822843303-QZ7RQVL7C5K9GLFSOKJV/L1170012.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822887327-VN7PPKTSWZVBTK1DPPD4/Pantofle_2022_Ceramic_+7.5+x+9.5+x+22_+H_Stevenson.1.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822858270-62YKQ10JTV8KREH7WEAW/Squeeze+Me+Tightly%2C+2022+Ceramic+glazed+stoneware+25+%C3%97+21+%C3%97+22+cm.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822863262-8H17PAJC96FNOG6MMHAC/L1160991.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667822879513-VLE5IJRYCM35DW2KBB66/A+show+of+affection_2022_Ceramic_+R2.5+x+11+x+28_L5+x+11+x+27_H_Stevenson.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823118682-0TSQTAPIMCK1SKZ5IER2/L1170008.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823139751-F295CDL36R49WRJN4VLN/Napoleon%E2%80%99s+Jar_+2022_Ceramic_17h+x+%E2%8C%8033_+H_Stevenson.1.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823195180-TDGL6ETT14FVCH7ZU5HN/L1170005.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1667823210581-ECBXBHCD3MYQ6AYGTMVX/Buckled_+2022_Ceramic_+10+x+9.5+x+21_+H_Stevenson.3.jpg Shoppers, Shoes & Sacks https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/body-poetics daily 0.75 2023-03-04 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/t/640359ad33a42373b6020fa7/1673620052581/ Body Poetics https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/63c1629a09fa870994beba0f/63c162abaffa544c935048f5/1673620052581/ Body Poetics https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/63c1629a09fa870994beba0f/63ea1fe18de04d6d64cc303e/1677937618511/ Body Poetics - Trailer Clay & Me Talking to L.B (2023) (V) 6:59 Clay & Me Talking to L.B and the resulting series of “Essential” ceramics have been made in line with the exhibition Body Poetics: The exhibition commissioned by GIANT presents the pairing of nine feminist artists working at the advent of feminist theory in the 1970’s and 80’s with a contemporary artist from a younger generation. Curated by Marcelle Joseph and Becca Pelly-Fry, Body Poetics runs from 16 February – 6 May 2023. Clay & Me Talking to L.B (2023) is a silent film that starts with an animated prologue. It reflects on both mine and Louise Bourgeois’ relationships to clay. Bourgeois was a trailblazing female artist whose expansive career spanned seven decades, her canonical works are inevitably a point of refence for many female artists. The connection between my work and that of L.B’s is psychoanalysis as an active concern, regardless of form or medium the work in both cases is symptomatic. Phillip Larratt-Smith’s brilliant two volume publication Louise Bourgeois | The Return Of The Repressed explores the artist’s profound relationship to psychoanalysis and her Notes are published for the first time. Bourgeois’s formal developments are traced through her extensive diaristic notes on her Freudian analysis with Lowenfeld. Likewise my weekly analysis is at the centre of my work. Sculpture (usually figurative) is a symptom. Making a new work that could sustain a conversation with Bourgeois’s about a psychoanalytical practice is at the root of my film. Clay & Me Talking to L.B considers and questions why Bourgeois made so little work in clay, her glazed porcelain Janus (1968-77) and the Nature Study editions manufactured at Sevres are notable examples. Yet, she spoke about the material frequently, the clay is my mother The most conclusive reason that Bourgeois rejected clay was because, as she herself declared on film to Brigitte Cornand, that ‘it’s essential quality was breakability’. The constant struggle with fragility inherent in making ceramic works is conversely the hook for me, it is why I persist in trying to make work from mud. In the animated prologue clay is described as the most bodily of all materials. Bourgeois smashed pottery for the camera in at least three of the seminal documentaries about her and for her the precariousness of ceramics was linked to family dynamics and bodily trauma. Clay & Me Talking to L.B pursues my needing to understand what ceramic’s inherent fragility means to me (having experienced a childhood home of smashed objects). At any given moment a work may break on me, why am I still pursuing a material that incorporates the violence? In making the film I learned what it meant to smash a sculpture, a powerful piece of knowledge. In my quest to understand the hysterical act of smashing things up the film witnesses the disintegration of a table full of sculpture which in turn forms a cosmic reflection. A broken ceramic is something most of us will encounter at some point, I did not particularly enjoy the violent act of breaking my work, whereas I think Bourgeois in part revelled in smashing ceramics because this was a role her father (regularly) performed, she also understood full well what the act meant to her, domestically and artistically whereas I have only just worked out the real meaning for me behind the broken ceramic. Thank you Louise! The results of the film’s breakages can be seen separately in a series of works called the Essentials in which a reparation place. Further works on show include Goddess of Things (2021) and Manu Fica (2021) which were made for my solo exhibition Reading Between the Lines at Sid Motion Gallery, an exhibition which centred on my memories of my childhood bed sheets. Like Bourgeois my childhood has not left me and perhaps I too refuse to let its memory go anywhere other than into the work. Written and performed by Holly Stevenson Produced by Charlie Gray and Holly Stevenson Directed by Mars Washington Edited by Jack Satchell Graphics by Claire Breach https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171647858-S1EDEPS6IE7SQ5O794MS/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential #1 Carcass Essential #1 Carcass (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 17 x 25 x 4.5 cm The Essentials are a series of wall based works made from ceramic fragments of the works smashed in the film Clay & Me Talking to L.B (2023). They take their title directly from Louise Bourgeois’s opinion that breakability is ceramics essential quality. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171707957-4R8ISXEI2QT8DUEAX690/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential #2 Pinch Essential #2 Pinch (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 14.5 x 23 x 4.5 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1673862004958-IMHPX9C7NZMHPJ3FZA21/image-asset.jpg Body Poetics - Clay & Me Talking to L.B. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171746205-ZU6A31V6DW61850ZWRCV/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential #3 Penis Essential #3 Penis (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 16 x 24 x4 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171785007-PTY4G26QBWXSAJHGY9KL/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential #4 Hysteric Essential #4 Hysteric (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 17 x 24 x 4 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171816687-VBAG3L4C6F7RK3X1L0AG/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential # 5 Umbilical Essential # 5 Umbilical (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 16 x 24 x 4 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1675171868459-LUQC2OJKIA2XGTBY61O5/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Essential # 6 Flower Essential # 6 Flower (2023) Ceramic: Glazed stoneware 15 x 23.5 x 2.5 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677932303894-59679MI70JVGIGW1PAZ7/DSC00471.jpg Body Poetics - Body Poetics Clay & Me Talking to L.B and the resulting series of “Essential” ceramics have been made in line with the exhibition Body Poetics: The exhibition commissioned by GIANT presents the pairing of nine feminist artists working at the advent of feminist theory in the 1970’s and 80’s with a contemporary artist from a younger generation. Curated by Marcelle Joseph and Becca Pelly-Fry, Body Poetics runs from 16 February – 6 May 2023. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677931571967-D5H3ATS34BHC2WODC03Z/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics - Installation view https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677931779628-PA4VM51B71I4VVR760C8/image-asset.jpeg Body Poetics https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/decentering-in-ceramics daily 0.75 2023-03-04 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/t/64035bf2ab5128597240a3c1/1677932683276/ Decentering In Ceramics https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/640338481daf8c70bed663fc/6403388be80cab0e8e048ff7/1677932683276/ Decentering In Ceramics https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677932767120-26ZOPRS4QP9734T9QGGQ/_GB14571.jpg Decentering In Ceramics - Blindly Hanging 1 Excerpt from the press release: Richard Saltoun Gallery presents decentering in Ceramics, a group exhibition curated by Giulia Pollicita that celebrates the symbolic power of ceramics and highlights the medium’s political, social, identitarian and imaginative declinations through the work of eight female artists. The exhibition situates seminal sculptures by Franca Maranò and Nedda Guidi, pioneers in technical and formal experimentation, alongside new work by a younger generation of international artists working with ceramics: Chiara Camoni, Gaia Fugazza, Florence Peake, Raffaela Nardi Rossano, Holly Stevenson and Zoe Williams. Through this intergenerational dialogue, the exhibition reverses the narration of a medium historically relegated to the 'decorative' realm, partially retracing its history and highlighting its potential for freedom. Holly Stevenson's ceramics have been produced during her artist residency with Laboratorio Piramide in the Bravetta district. Mixing the suggestions of Catholicism that permeate the city of Rome with the daily life of the neighbourhood and its community, her pair of sculptures Priest Beast and Coat Hanger Angel (2022), represent a process of transposition and sublimation of innovation in the wake of tradition, in which conservatism and progressivism coexist. Referencing the abolition of the right to abortion in many American states, the crutch, used in the past for the illegal and often mortal termination of pregnancies, becomes a symbol of the claim of freedom against the oppressive patriarchal power. The works of Gaia Fugazza, Florence Peake, Holly Stevenson and Zoe Williams were created in Rome in 2022 tas part of Laboratorio Piramide’s residency programme, a project financed by the Lazio region to promote the encounter between contemporary art and craftsmanship, which allowed the artists to work in the historic Bottega Paolelli in the Bravetta district, experimenting with materials, techniques and processes of the Italian tradition. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677934518639-AP6JE3UNMP66YYTMFH6O/image-asset.jpeg Decentering In Ceramics - decentering in Ceramics Installation view of the group exhibition decentering in Ceramics, curated by Giulia Policita for Richard Saltoun Gallery, Rome. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677932821887-9QVT36YWXCJHH7JLP0P7/_GB14574.jpg Decentering In Ceramics - Coat Hanger Angel Coat Hanger Angel (2022) Ceramic: Glazed terracotta and gold, 50 x 25 x 16 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677932909054-OKPWXV9OD8LN7BCG35A4/_GB14590.jpg Decentering In Ceramics - Splash Splash (2022) Ceramic: Terracotta with crystalline glaze, 17 x 20 x 16 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677932920145-1A2XGZH4Q7K9XNGLX4ON/_GB14588.jpg Decentering In Ceramics - Splash Installation view https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677933522339-19Q6128WTJPF1FISJIT3/_GB14609.jpg Decentering In Ceramics - Priest Beast Priest Beast (2022) Ceramic: Glazed terracotta with gold, 66.5 x 30 x 10 cm https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1677935081853-K86IAS63N5ZMI8S68NYM/image-asset.jpeg Decentering In Ceramics - On the inside you can’t see the structure. On the inside you can’t see the structure. Image: Work in progress at the Paolelli workshop A text written by the artist Holly Stevenson on the occasion of being a resident in Giulia Policita’s Laboratorio Piramide Laboratorio Piramide gathered up its name from the tomb of Caio Cestio, a monument found in the zone where the residency was initially envisaged to take place: Here begins a series of mental hurdles without a pyramid in sight. Dreamt up as a cryptic resting place for the rulers of Ancient Egypt the pyramid is an architectural puzzle in which to display and hide treasures, its function is oxymoronic. The phrase ‘tutta casa e chiesa’ (all home and church) used to express a life of female conformity struck me as the very opposite of my new life in the Pyramid’s Laboratory where I make ceramics all day and sleep at the nuns by night, for me it is tutta ceramica e convento. From the studio, where I wrestle with argilla rossa Montelupo, I can see my bedroom window in the Convent and the Sisters now form an important passage in my new world. Suora Anna Magnani voluntarily asserted without art Rome would not exist and so it was gently understood and accepted that I was a member of the congregation of the Church of Art. The zigzagging slopes between clay and convent, Paoelli and the Sisters, map the paths of Laboratorio Piramide’s chambers. The King’s chamber namely Elio’s kilns being at the top of the process. This is not a residency but a series of connections that must be made and in the doing so the art will get made. I wanted to ask the Sister’s their opinions on the recent overturning of Roe versus Wade, or rather their opinions on prenatal life and the feminist context. I didn’t because it felt like just as with the ancient Egyptians their opinion on the afterlife was clear cut. A ubiquitous Madonna hung in my bedroom and ‘Breakfast Jesus’ watched over my first coffee of the day. I received my answer symbolically as there was not a metal coat hanger insight in my convent wardrobe yet an abundance of them had been left tucked behind a wooden panel in the studio and the form of l’angelo degli porta abiti’ arrived. Let me be clear I am not advocating the use of metal coat hangers for medical tools. But, in today’s war on female bodies the coat hanger stands as a symbol of what happens if the right to abortion is taken away, it is a sick symbol of freedom in the face of the loss of liberty. The Laboratory proved to be as understandable as a series of sessions with the psychoanalyst, chambers of associations, all wings, wires and prayers. I coiled and slabbed the silken red clay as the trains of forms with their bodily concerns emerged, a series of little cyclops faces wind there short sighted way around the coat hanger shapes, a beastly priest with a mollusc for an eye, the angel and an ode to Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray. There is no sorting out the fact from the fiction in the Pyramid, it is about the freedom to triangulate fact + fiction to make art. Real stories sculpted into serious meaning because when you are on the inside you can’t see the structure. https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/frieze-sculpture-2023 daily 0.75 2023-10-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696929815784-3C4YQN0NZSDSGMMRCN98/image-asset.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 - The Debate, Frieze Sculpture 2023 The Debate, Frieze Sculpture 2023, takes place from 20 September - 29 October 2023 in The Regent’s Park's English Gardens, curated by Fatoş Üstek, presented by Sid Motion Gallery and Pi Artworks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696929815784-3C4YQN0NZSDSGMMRCN98/image-asset.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 - The Debate, Frieze Sculpture 2023 The Debate, Frieze Sculpture 2023, takes place from 20 September - 29 October 2023 in The Regent’s Park's English Gardens, curated by Fatoş Üstek, presented by Sid Motion Gallery and Pi Artworks https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696929855711-6GCM5IJJ41HJ6XRRN78R/image3.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 The Debate is a ceramic installation comprised of two near life-size adult figures and half of an oversized boiled egg. Typical of the artist’s practice, the figures combine abstract and figurative elements, which, following the glazing process, form anthropomorphic birds reminiscent of ducks. Depending on the direction of approach of the viewer, the figures seem to be looking either at a complete egg with the potential for hatching, or one half of a bisected boiled egg. The artist’s interest lies in the duck and the egg being traditional ceramic forms. Ducks being one of the avian world’s greatest migrants has given them long-held significance in the creative realm, and since the advent of pottery, they have been sculpted in clay. Likewise, the egg has enjoyed widespread ceramic popularity, often used as a trompe l’oeil. More curiously, the terracotta egg was used as a Talmudic measurement in the ancient world. Here, the egg cannot be intentionally read as a singular symbolic gesture, rather it is positioned as a challenge to our food-chain supply and to reference the quintessential life debate: whether we perceive our experience of living as being half-full or half-empty. Stevenson nods to the playful, uncanny, sculptures of pop art, which impacted both outdoor artwork and inventively referenced female reproductivity. Here, the egg can be read as a body clock, while the two figures whose elongated torsos rise from striped canopic-shaped jars ultimately evade gender categorization. The Debate is the artist’s largest ceramic work to-date, and within the realm of the public park, it seeks to inspire a multitude of questions, everything from ducks, eggs and reproduction, to picnics and cannibalism. There is something both charming and monstrous about a bird and half a boiled egg sharing space, and, as the title implies, debates in today’s socio-political climate are not singular, but complex and multifaceted. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696931314585-7ZMJQM7FTD8WSRH4AULQ/L1000155.jpg Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696929894298-DLDHKYP76WMZYDF6J3E3/image1.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696929887789-WNTHYN6YMFEOU02CWIGJ/image5.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696930637761-EAN9QXWUPVS5IFV7XADJ/The+Debate+at+Night.jpg Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696928043733-TOLBSE8XL35W1BWN0XO9/image-asset.jpeg Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696932097205-2H5T9I442PW8092RTF82/Screenshot+2023-10-10+at+11.01.20.png Frieze Sculpture 2023 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1696932162884-LEWFS4SGF7R63TO0PZU0/hands-eggs.jpg Frieze Sculpture 2023 - EGGISM: How would you eat yours? The Vegan Egg Project in 3 Egg Acts by Holly Stevenson and Huma Kabakci Throughout history, eggs have appeared in countless artworks, serving as a universal symbol of life, growth, and transformation representing various concepts such as fertility, birth, creation, and resurrection. In many mythologies, the egg is associated with the world's birth and fertility. In ancient Egypt, for example, the Milky Way emerged from the waters as a hill of rubbish, and the god Reborn from an egg laid on this mound by a celestial bird. The egg also can represent the renewal of the cycle of nature in the context of the ceramic installation commissioned for Frieze Sculpture Park titled “The Debate” by Holly Stevenson, an oversized half-boiled egg placed near adult life-size figures. Typical of the artist’s practice, the figures are composed of abstract and figurative elements, and here they meld to form anthropomorphic birds that, on account of the glazing, recall ducks. In response to “The Debate”, hosted by Pi Artworks and Sid Motion Gallery, in collaboration with artist Holly Stevenson we invite you to an egg act by offering a symbolic vegan egg as a gesture. While you listen to the artist and curator talk further about the work, the references and the story behind it, you will be encouraged to touch, smell and taste the vegan egg that resembles a real egg in form and texture. You’ll be invited to answer the famous riddle, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Each Egg Act will include 88 vegan eggs to hand out with an artist edition picnic bag, so please make sure to RSVP if you wish to take one. https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/print daily 0.75 2025-04-27 https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/the-freud-museum daily 0.75 2026-03-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814238639-CU602XFL2BNWO3PFBRD3/Intro_Panel.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751813913356-643QXMNPJSMAG7KEDKPY/HS_Jokes_Topple_+Taboos_2.jpg The Freud Museum - Tracing The Irretraceable at The Freud Museum, London. Tracing The Irretraceable is an intimate exhibition looking at the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis to Holly Stevenson in dialogue with the Freud Museum collection and the collection of the late Jane McAdam Freud (1958–2022). The exhibition presents Stevenson’s ceramic sculptures dedicated to reading Freud through his personal collection of objects and reflects on McAdam Freud’s familial approach to the Freud Museum. Here at the Freud Museum London Stevenson seeks to reveal how Freud’s interpretation of his stories locked within his own collection have influenced art. Her project In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray focuses on an object on Sigmund’s desk of unknown origins that was often filled with knickknacks. The Walking Cure returns to the story of Gradiva, inspired by a Roman bas-relief, which became a Surrealist muse. Her Sculptural method of reading Freud addressing the comings and goings of repression and eco-feminism through a Freudian lens results in a series of tantalising and humorous ceramic sculptures. McAdam Freud’s eighteen-month residency at the museum in 2006 culminated in the exhibition Relative Relations and Stevenson triangulates her conversation with the Freuds with two sculptural portraits by McAdam Freud, one of herself another of her father. The exhibition marks the completion of the first F.A.R; the Freud Artist Residency established by the Jane McAdam Freud Estate. The title, Tracing the Irretraceable takes its cue from Freud’s poetic writing in The Interpretation of Dreams as Stevenson set out on the elusive search to trace knowledge of her own art working in line with that of McAdam Freud’s, and in turn a wider art-historical reading of Freud’s psychoanalytic legacy in contemporary art practice. Throughout the past eighteen months, the inaugural resident Holly Stevenson has spent time in Příbor, Czechia, the birth place of Sigmund and the resting home of his great-granddaughter, Jane McAdam Freud. McAdam Freud’s lively eponymous gallery is located on the central town square, where a presentation of Stevenson’s and McAdam Freud’s works created a dialogical exhibition. Tracing the Irretraceable has been made possible with the generous support of the Jane McAdam Freud Estate and the Arts Council England Unlocking Collections Grant. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814238639-CU602XFL2BNWO3PFBRD3/Intro_Panel.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751813928248-8FBV4KQ091LCPEVR2ECF/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0001.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751815032415-NV9ZXWN5XS3M9D96XTYN/HS_Eye_Feel_the_Sun_4.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814027656-YGR8JVKDCSSMWZR6G7HS/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0017.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814037725-A1R6PPYCSJ1WMRZD2ADA/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0016.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814937244-O5UXH4LC9SMU8O2MOILN/HS_Beware_of_+Hairpins_1.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814067852-6ANYP4T7VW7QHJE9MN5M/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0011.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814090531-3920YHS72KV9GPI18U55/HS_Sibling_+Displacement_3.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814332697-MO908S8P5RAVCWLGGUCU/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0012.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1707737152614-WY5HGHYBTQFKLKG7PHV6/*1.Sigmund_Freuds_Ashtray_Project+copy.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814382810-OITZTC1OIPFSSAY9OWBH/HS_Sticky_Libido-1.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814352016-RDIVPWHL1LZ1YWGSCS2M/Tracing_The_Irreatraceable_Install_Freud_HS_0008.jpg The Freud Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751814550935-57CIYFLGNG8S5ZXH1416/L1020347.jpg The Freud Museum https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/freud-artist-residency daily 0.75 2025-05-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393039010-QXYDE5N9OM5D5I7MFI09/G1130384.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency - FAR FAR Holly Stevenson is the first artist-in-residence to launch the Freud Artist Residency (F.A.R.) and the project entitled Tracing the Irretraceable has been awarded an Unlocking Collections Grant from Arts Council England. Jane McAdam Freud was the celebrated multi-disciplinary artist and thinker, the daughter of Lucian Freud, and Great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Her contribution to contemporary art, sculpture and conceptual thinking has been recognised internationally and her work included in notable private and public collections. Tracing The Irretraceable / Sledování Nevystopovatelného, in Czech, is a research project, artist residency and exhibition series presenting Stevenson’s exploration of McAdam Freud’s work. The results will be exhibited across three spaces, namely the Jane McAdam Freud Museum and Gallery, The Sigmund Freud Birthplace Museum, both in Příbor, Czech Republic along with The Freud Museum, London. The title of the exhibitions remains the same across the three museums but their contents and format are necessarily diverse in response to the individual collections. The project examines the significance of psychoanalytic culture for contemporary art through Holly Stevenson’s and Jane McAdam Freud’s practices and in relation to the artists’ analysis of Sigmund Freud’s theories and collection. When the Jane McAdam Freud estate Curator, Georgia Powell approached Holly Stevenson for this unique experience, the artist was faced with the question “what might it mean to me to be an artist in residence in the world of Jane McAdam Freud?” Stevenson’s response: “Through this exploration of Jane’s art making, I will observe how the language of psychoanalysis is not simply a form of interpretation but that art making, what’s going on inside, is a form of psychoanalysis: I will match my works with one of Jane’s as if in-conversation.” Dreaming remains a central theme of the project; Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams became the bible of Surrealist art and the title for this project was subconsciously formed from the seminal chapter six ‘The Dream - Work’. What was so revolutionary about Freud’s approach to dreams was his methodology in line with the Freudian understanding of human nature. Explaining his ‘method’ he wrote: “We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from the manifest dream-content. We are thus confronted with a new problem, an entirely novel task - that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream-thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes by which the latter has grown out of the former.” Stevenson has taken on the act of tracing as both a psychoanalytical method and an artistic one. Curatorially the exhibitions see Stevenson work closely with Powell to examine the collections, creating associations between the artefacts and art works in order to reveal new stories about the makers and the relevance of psychoanalysis. The central theme, bound up in the title, is the notion of legacy as a ghost, a form of grief, a memory and Stevenson questions how artefacts become significant beyond their individual intrinsic beauty or craftsmanship; they hold the remains of the past actions of their makers and owners. The project has allowed time away from Stevenson’s usual practice, with time spent in Příbor, Czechia, and in McAdam Freud’s London studio, resulting in experimentation and permission to fully embrace psychoanalytical mechanisms through her work. The results present an other-worldly collection of talismanic works; wide-eyed ceramic heads presented as knitting machines with red thread emerging from them; death masks that question the notion of time, shoes which conjure up the notion of ‘walking in someone’s else’s’; and cloud-like outlines of a human form. The project and collection of works speak of legacy, with references to the Freudian mixture of Catholicism and Judaism, they are votive offerings relating to death and ritual, and a fitting first-step in the evaluation of McAdam Freud’s life’s output. The town of Příbor, Czechia will provide the setting to the first iteration of the project on November 8th 2024 and Jane’s return to this space of her ancestors is explored by Stevenson. Sigmund Freud’s theories widely discuss the significance of infancy on the development of the mind, and this town, occupied by Freud during his early childhood remained close to his heart. He looked back on Příbor as an idyllic, pastoral setting and his birth house, now a museum, remains a poignant, spiritual home to psychoanalysis. Jane’s great-great-grandfather Jacob relocated the family to Vienna after his wool business failed, Stevenson has incorporated knitted wool cables into her ceramics using local traditional hand knitting techniques. These techniques are celebrated in the local museum The Centre For Traditional Technologies. The performance, Your Heart Is In my Hands will see the Přibor community come together for a candlelit procession on November 8th. Twelve ceramic heart-shaped candle holders made by Stevenson in McAdam Freud’s London studio will be carried from The Birth Place Museum to the exhibition at Jane’s eponymous gallery on the town square, accompanied by a Czech choir. The third exhibition in London’s The Freud Museum in May 2025 will involve Stevenson’s long-term project which considers everyday objects used by Sigmund Freud as being uncanny. Since 2017 Stevenson has explored a Jadite dish (museum #3111) on Freud’s desk, purportedly his favourite ashtray: Taking the ovular dish and the symbolic cylindrical cigar as a metaphor for gender she creates a shapely alphabet produce bodily scenarios in clay. Works from this project are now held in celebrated collections and have been exhibited widely. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393039010-QXYDE5N9OM5D5I7MFI09/G1130384.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency - FAR FAR Holly Stevenson is the first artist-in-residence to launch the Freud Artist Residency (F.A.R.) and the project entitled Tracing the Irretraceable has been awarded an Unlocking Collections Grant from Arts Council England. Jane McAdam Freud was the celebrated multi-disciplinary artist and thinker, the daughter of Lucian Freud, and Great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Her contribution to contemporary art, sculpture and conceptual thinking has been recognised internationally and her work included in notable private and public collections. Tracing The Irretraceable / Sledování Nevystopovatelného, in Czech, is a research project, artist residency and exhibition series presenting Stevenson’s exploration of McAdam Freud’s work. The results will be exhibited across three spaces, namely the Jane McAdam Freud Museum and Gallery, The Sigmund Freud Birthplace Museum, both in Příbor, Czech Republic along with The Freud Museum, London. The title of the exhibitions remains the same across the three museums but their contents and format are necessarily diverse in response to the individual collections. The project examines the significance of psychoanalytic culture for contemporary art through Holly Stevenson’s and Jane McAdam Freud’s practices and in relation to the artists’ analysis of Sigmund Freud’s theories and collection. When the Jane McAdam Freud estate Curator, Georgia Powell approached Holly Stevenson for this unique experience, the artist was faced with the question “what might it mean to me to be an artist in residence in the world of Jane McAdam Freud?” Stevenson’s response: “Through this exploration of Jane’s art making, I will observe how the language of psychoanalysis is not simply a form of interpretation but that art making, what’s going on inside, is a form of psychoanalysis: I will match my works with one of Jane’s as if in-conversation.” Dreaming remains a central theme of the project; Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams became the bible of Surrealist art and the title for this project was subconsciously formed from the seminal chapter six ‘The Dream - Work’. What was so revolutionary about Freud’s approach to dreams was his methodology in line with the Freudian understanding of human nature. Explaining his ‘method’ he wrote: “We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from the manifest dream-content. We are thus confronted with a new problem, an entirely novel task - that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream-thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes by which the latter has grown out of the former.” Stevenson has taken on the act of tracing as both a psychoanalytical method and an artistic one. Curatorially the exhibitions see Stevenson work closely with Powell to examine the collections, creating associations between the artefacts and art works in order to reveal new stories about the makers and the relevance of psychoanalysis. The central theme, bound up in the title, is the notion of legacy as a ghost, a form of grief, a memory and Stevenson questions how artefacts become significant beyond their individual intrinsic beauty or craftsmanship; they hold the remains of the past actions of their makers and owners. The project has allowed time away from Stevenson’s usual practice, with time spent in Příbor, Czechia, and in McAdam Freud’s London studio, resulting in experimentation and permission to fully embrace psychoanalytical mechanisms through her work. The results present an other-worldly collection of talismanic works; wide-eyed ceramic heads presented as knitting machines with red thread emerging from them; death masks that question the notion of time, shoes which conjure up the notion of ‘walking in someone’s else’s’; and cloud-like outlines of a human form. The project and collection of works speak of legacy, with references to the Freudian mixture of Catholicism and Judaism, they are votive offerings relating to death and ritual, and a fitting first-step in the evaluation of McAdam Freud’s life’s output. The town of Příbor, Czechia will provide the setting to the first iteration of the project on November 8th 2024 and Jane’s return to this space of her ancestors is explored by Stevenson. Sigmund Freud’s theories widely discuss the significance of infancy on the development of the mind, and this town, occupied by Freud during his early childhood remained close to his heart. He looked back on Příbor as an idyllic, pastoral setting and his birth house, now a museum, remains a poignant, spiritual home to psychoanalysis. Jane’s great-great-grandfather Jacob relocated the family to Vienna after his wool business failed, Stevenson has incorporated knitted wool cables into her ceramics using local traditional hand knitting techniques. These techniques are celebrated in the local museum The Centre For Traditional Technologies. The performance, Your Heart Is In my Hands will see the Přibor community come together for a candlelit procession on November 8th. Twelve ceramic heart-shaped candle holders made by Stevenson in McAdam Freud’s London studio will be carried from The Birth Place Museum to the exhibition at Jane’s eponymous gallery on the town square, accompanied by a Czech choir. The third exhibition in London’s The Freud Museum in May 2025 will involve Stevenson’s long-term project which considers everyday objects used by Sigmund Freud as being uncanny. Since 2017 Stevenson has explored a Jadite dish (museum #3111) on Freud’s desk, purportedly his favourite ashtray: Taking the ovular dish and the symbolic cylindrical cigar as a metaphor for gender she creates a shapely alphabet produce bodily scenarios in clay. Works from this project are now held in celebrated collections and have been exhibited widely. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393120944-OB8OO6N9JPTYFZN0OPA0/G1130390.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393155603-RB9VVF0HJPNS20GS89KJ/FOT_5537.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394021646-U2D0GRMNSDDT1P9HYAM8/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Pull+The+Wool+Through+My+Eye+0027.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744395087588-X65MNUJK38YKVQ1HH3PH/R6M10231-Edit+kopie.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393497831-686WRB2AZRKEJA3WKNMM/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Hector+Speaks+Volumes0016.jpg F.A.R. 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Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393255216-GSW1B032W7Z38QCUCLSA/24.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393544448-UPQIYAHC4SLOQ5L374VN/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_P%C5%99%C3%ADbor+Steps+0032.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744393516254-NYMY63PW1OIZFISIAWED/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Labyrinth_Votive_2.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394095482-0HEV9FXPMH4E6GV9UEKS/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Speak+Well_Votive_3.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394124426-XTHOGKONB5LI5PK5XF13/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Medusa_Votive_1.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394135736-1JBB71YGGACDXE6UVNN6/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Dear_Heart_Votive_4.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744395409912-7U6D6ZLQRY37B4Q2UC5D/R6M19692-Edit+kopie+copy+2.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394601128-B9T2GDRDVWZL6V4GZ68L/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Going_Act1_0009.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394611407-0U4RBCLPWU9P9C8EJIXI/Holly-Stevenson-Freud-Residency_Going_Act8_0015.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394865620-RD6FFJNL8DT1WCRL9VNH/G1130638.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744394969531-JPTIF89AZQR1ET3F7HK1/R6M10122-Edit+kopie.jpg F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/6738b3c1b32774628063096e/68148fa28c9ece0dbfb48e23/1746177954479/ F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/6738b3c1b32774628063096e/68148fc518d93e408b57f0b0/1746177989250/ F.A.R. Freud Artist Residency https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/the-surreal-hand daily 0.75 2025-04-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744392416452-R6CRSN4RN76S8ZJCBKI0/0.HS_Group+Shot_FRONT.jpg The Surreal Hand - The Surreal Hand The ceramics of The Surreal Hand are each inspired by the 65 objects that were collected by Freud and situated on his desk top: the knowledge that they were all hand-held by the father of psychoanalysis as he pondered the significance of art and psychoanalysis, inspired Holly to investigate the same scale. The Surreal Hand, a solo online presentation at Richard Saltoun Gallery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744392416452-R6CRSN4RN76S8ZJCBKI0/0.HS_Group+Shot_FRONT.jpg The Surreal Hand - The Surreal Hand The ceramics of The Surreal Hand are each inspired by the 65 objects that were collected by Freud and situated on his desk top: the knowledge that they were all hand-held by the father of psychoanalysis as he pondered the significance of art and psychoanalysis, inspired Holly to investigate the same scale. The Surreal Hand, a solo online presentation at Richard Saltoun Gallery https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/solo-exhibitions daily 0.75 2025-04-12 https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/the-nature-of-things daily 0.75 2025-04-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744399920213-UA6RIZG8S9P1YCF54TJC/CASTOR_GALLERY_054.jpg The Nature of Things - The Nature of Things In The Nature of Things, curated by artist Jane Hayes Greenwood, works by 19 artists explore the thingliness of nature and the nature of things. The show cultivates a network of connections between works that are created in a world where AI supports cultural production, plant intelligence has gained wider recognition and the boundaries between human and non-human entities are increasingly blurred. The works speak of personal experiences, touch on ecology, ancient and indigenous knowledge and explore our complex relationship with the vegetal world, telling stories of displacement, violence, extraction and consumption. The Nature of Things draws a connection between contemporary perceptions of the natural world and ancient animistic worldviews, set against a backdrop of climate emergency. The exhibition underscores a renewed engagement with the (un)natural world Holly Stevenson’s low-heeled ceramic shoes (2023/4) grow flowers, sprout mushrooms, wear human features and produce tentacles that prod and poke. Utilising a symbolic language, these works take on a Disney-like animation where cartoonish forms serve as a gateway to the feminine unconscious, with the line between the animate and inanimate, the real and the imagined becoming intriguingly blurred. Sophie Barber, Shiraz Bayjoo, Gareth Cadwallader, Exodus Crooks, Martyn Cross, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Andy Holden, Serena Korda, Mark Leckey, Robin Mason, Vivien McDermid, Karen McLean, Victor Seaward, Holly Stevenson, Jonathan Trayte, Emma Talbot, Georg Wilson, Dominic Watson, Lian Zhang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744399920213-UA6RIZG8S9P1YCF54TJC/CASTOR_GALLERY_054.jpg The Nature of Things - The Nature of Things In The Nature of Things, curated by artist Jane Hayes Greenwood, works by 19 artists explore the thingliness of nature and the nature of things. The show cultivates a network of connections between works that are created in a world where AI supports cultural production, plant intelligence has gained wider recognition and the boundaries between human and non-human entities are increasingly blurred. The works speak of personal experiences, touch on ecology, ancient and indigenous knowledge and explore our complex relationship with the vegetal world, telling stories of displacement, violence, extraction and consumption. The Nature of Things draws a connection between contemporary perceptions of the natural world and ancient animistic worldviews, set against a backdrop of climate emergency. The exhibition underscores a renewed engagement with the (un)natural world Holly Stevenson’s low-heeled ceramic shoes (2023/4) grow flowers, sprout mushrooms, wear human features and produce tentacles that prod and poke. Utilising a symbolic language, these works take on a Disney-like animation where cartoonish forms serve as a gateway to the feminine unconscious, with the line between the animate and inanimate, the real and the imagined becoming intriguingly blurred. Sophie Barber, Shiraz Bayjoo, Gareth Cadwallader, Exodus Crooks, Martyn Cross, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Andy Holden, Serena Korda, Mark Leckey, Robin Mason, Vivien McDermid, Karen McLean, Victor Seaward, Holly Stevenson, Jonathan Trayte, Emma Talbot, Georg Wilson, Dominic Watson, Lian Zhang https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744399905258-8NLA9U0YPN6H5A5RFLIA/CASTOR_GALLERY_055.jpg The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402332812-ZG4S06T5365J2PC51QT5/Holly-Stevenson_The+Earth+Tastes+My+Lips_2023-4.4.jpg The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744400254006-D1JKPDRFQM8QZYO9Z2A8/79f701b7-86cf-4718-b051-24a29704ea61.JPG The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402351569-XPDQZVCIN9L3H13GMQ3J/Holly-Stevenson_Absolute+Troopers_2024.jpg The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402269123-BUFQS141FREYMVZ900FX/Holly-Stevenson_Pom+Pom+Along_2024.3.jpg The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744399847616-H1OCM7BS8ZCE0OS7QAXB/On_The_Nature_of_Things.JPG The Nature of Things https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744399884198-200EJL6TRJK2A545075F/CASTOR_GALLERY_061.jpg The Nature of Things https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/suppose-you-are-not daily 0.75 2025-04-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402184537-K3ZN7OM2XQ8CIQBH7RQJ/Holly-Arter.jpg Suppose You Are Not - Suppose You Are Not Curated by Selen Ansen, the exhibition Suppose You Are Not probes the ways in which the domestic context of a private collection can be transferred into a museum context. In so doing, it explores the possibilities of restaging and articulating the affinities created between distinct objects by means of a collector's desires and endeavours. The exhibition, which spans the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries of Arter, brings together works by almost 400 artists, anonymous artefacts and mass-produced items, as well as multifarious objects. Initially formed for an individual purpose within the boundaries of a private space, now made public through a curatorial approach in an art institution, this body of works presents a world at the junction of times and forms that defy habitual classifications. This world, which brings to existence the collector as an abstract subject interacting with the artefacts in their possession, allows a form of experience that connects reality and fiction, as objects leaving the private sphere reformulate their unique character in a new context. Approaching the collection as a multifaceted and living organism, Suppose You Are Not proposes to reflect upon the kinship between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the practice of collecting and the objects that populate our daily lives. Formed with works selected from the Ömer Koç Collection, Suppose You Are Not is concerned with finding worldly ways to rise upwards in the world where everything falls and keeps falling, and with providing possibilities to formulate infinitude where finitude is the rule. Based on Omar Khayyam’s (1048-1131) verses, where the poet reminds us to embrace life freely by transcending the limits of our own selves, the exhibition invites visitors to challenge given boundaries while exploring the attribution of new meanings to objects in a realm devoid of chronology and hierarchy. In this territory populated by objects of all sorts, the conglomeration of books, furniture, paintings, sculptures and photographs not only tells us of human pleasures, desires, aspirations and dreams of past lives; it also reflects the spirited viewpoint of the collector. Suppose You Are Notdelves into the passionate striving to collect and preserve the traces of humanity, the good and the evil, the ephemeral gestures, states, allusions and movements ranging from the most sublime to the most mundane, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral, which manage to persist by being conveyed from the dead to the living. Through the connections they give birth to in the exhibition space, the numerous works and objects brought together open up a field of vision that allows the emergence of new associations and alliances. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402184537-K3ZN7OM2XQ8CIQBH7RQJ/Holly-Arter.jpg Suppose You Are Not - Suppose You Are Not Curated by Selen Ansen, the exhibition Suppose You Are Not probes the ways in which the domestic context of a private collection can be transferred into a museum context. In so doing, it explores the possibilities of restaging and articulating the affinities created between distinct objects by means of a collector's desires and endeavours. The exhibition, which spans the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries of Arter, brings together works by almost 400 artists, anonymous artefacts and mass-produced items, as well as multifarious objects. Initially formed for an individual purpose within the boundaries of a private space, now made public through a curatorial approach in an art institution, this body of works presents a world at the junction of times and forms that defy habitual classifications. This world, which brings to existence the collector as an abstract subject interacting with the artefacts in their possession, allows a form of experience that connects reality and fiction, as objects leaving the private sphere reformulate their unique character in a new context. Approaching the collection as a multifaceted and living organism, Suppose You Are Not proposes to reflect upon the kinship between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the practice of collecting and the objects that populate our daily lives. Formed with works selected from the Ömer Koç Collection, Suppose You Are Not is concerned with finding worldly ways to rise upwards in the world where everything falls and keeps falling, and with providing possibilities to formulate infinitude where finitude is the rule. Based on Omar Khayyam’s (1048-1131) verses, where the poet reminds us to embrace life freely by transcending the limits of our own selves, the exhibition invites visitors to challenge given boundaries while exploring the attribution of new meanings to objects in a realm devoid of chronology and hierarchy. In this territory populated by objects of all sorts, the conglomeration of books, furniture, paintings, sculptures and photographs not only tells us of human pleasures, desires, aspirations and dreams of past lives; it also reflects the spirited viewpoint of the collector. Suppose You Are Notdelves into the passionate striving to collect and preserve the traces of humanity, the good and the evil, the ephemeral gestures, states, allusions and movements ranging from the most sublime to the most mundane, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral, which manage to persist by being conveyed from the dead to the living. Through the connections they give birth to in the exhibition space, the numerous works and objects brought together open up a field of vision that allows the emergence of new associations and alliances. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1744402855181-HD4Z1K3PVUXCJGW2XTHF/Stevenson_H_TURKISH-TROUSERS-2022-21x26x21-2.jpg Suppose You Are Not https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/artist-monograph daily 0.75 2026-01-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824125790-DJ25VUJLQK76UGFE28NI/L1100329.jpg News - Tracing the Irretraceable This beautifully crafted artist’s monograph delves deeper into the themes explored in the exhibitionTracing the Irretraceable. Featuring insightful essays by Elizabeth Fullerton, Sharon Kivland, and Emily Steer, the 68-page volume is richly illustrated and printed on a selection of special papers. Each copy is hand-finished, making it as much a collectible object as a compelling companion to the exhibition held at the Freud Museum London, 14 May - 29 June 2025. In this catalogue available from the Freud Museum Shop · Preface Holly Stevenson · Cerebral Cigar Titan There - A conversation with Elizabeth Fullerton · The Irretraceable - Sharon Kivland · In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray: Holly Stevenson – Emily Steer · List of Works Freud Museum London · List of Works Jane McAdam Freud Gallery Příbor · Acknowledgements Designed by Joe Hales Limited Edition of 200 Format: Paperback Pages: 68 (52 on gloss and 16 on pink uncoated paper) Publisher/Imprint Sylvia ISBN/Ean1739300890 / 9781739300890 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1745776118949-NZ9XAYDFO9P24B8RDOX2/Holly-Stevenson-Tracing-COVER-20250422.01.jpg News - Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable - Exhibition Catalogue This beautifully crafted artist’s monograph delves deeper into the themes explored in the exhibition Tracing the Irretraceable. Featuring insightful essays by Elizabeth Fullerton, Sharon Kivland, and Emily Steer, the 68-page volume is richly illustrated and printed on a selection of special papers. Each copy is hand-finished, making it as much a collectible object as a compelling companion to the exhibition held at the Freud Museum London, 14 May - 29 June 2025. Pre-order your copy at a special price from The Freud Museum Shop and they will post your order shortly after the publication date - the 14th of May 2025. In this catalogue Preface Holly Stevenson Cerebral Cigar Titan There - A conversation with Elizabeth Fullerton The Irretraceable - Sharon Kivland In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray: Holly Stevenson – Emily Steer List of Works Freud Museum London List of Works Jane McAdam Freud Gallery Příbor Acknowledgements Edition of 200 copies Designed by Joe Hales ISBN 978-1-7393008-9-0 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824125790-DJ25VUJLQK76UGFE28NI/L1100329.jpg News - Tracing the Irretraceable This beautifully crafted artist’s monograph delves deeper into the themes explored in the exhibitionTracing the Irretraceable. Featuring insightful essays by Elizabeth Fullerton, Sharon Kivland, and Emily Steer, the 68-page volume is richly illustrated and printed on a selection of special papers. Each copy is hand-finished, making it as much a collectible object as a compelling companion to the exhibition held at the Freud Museum London, 14 May - 29 June 2025. In this catalogue available from the Freud Museum Shop · Preface Holly Stevenson · Cerebral Cigar Titan There - A conversation with Elizabeth Fullerton · The Irretraceable - Sharon Kivland · In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray: Holly Stevenson – Emily Steer · List of Works Freud Museum London · List of Works Jane McAdam Freud Gallery Příbor · Acknowledgements Designed by Joe Hales Limited Edition of 200 Format: Paperback Pages: 68 (52 on gloss and 16 on pink uncoated paper) Publisher/Imprint Sylvia ISBN/Ean1739300890 / 9781739300890 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824304882-J95ZMMVTF79OEEJPYISS/L1100337+copy+2.jpeg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824400928-1B3UKIQUDIXH3KJBMSPM/L1100356+copy+2.jpeg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824464061-16WZU40QJKR0GN7KWMO6/L1100357+copy+2.jpeg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824503481-9L3PS0JY6W87QJZ87D82/L1100362+copy.jpeg News https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1751824558912-MZWWFP05ISKS5GZ6OTA1/L1100364+copy+2.jpeg News https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/bibliography daily 0.75 2025-05-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085376914-2JM2PYWSWZRM255ML2G6/L1100458+copy.jpg Bibliography https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/680e6fc5d0614c3f50f47e1f/6831aa23b85d5113d684322a/1748085297284/ Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085376914-2JM2PYWSWZRM255ML2G6/L1100458+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085389421-U0NTOLFHLBDJZYWWQXOQ/L1100401+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085397020-63WXROPUR4MLUSK3QC4V/L1100412+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085441271-RMRWWZ98XSAH23BZ8MGH/L1100381+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085475326-3P5YTAD6XFTMBD6604ZL/L1100419+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085455088-FBRE5BHM59WY5OYSGUSE/L1100392+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085515417-5WHDQMP1JZIUF45LCHOX/L1100440+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085487503-HPHI652JHL2WAQ4HDN58/L1100415+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085497724-NG4LIVK4DF8VOWO6UPJN/L1100453+copy.jpg Bibliography https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/1748085507548-9IWGJ0NF1TNVPABRGGH4/L1100424+copy.jpg Bibliography https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/home-1-holly-stevenson daily 1.0 2020-07-21 https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/interviews/reviews daily 0.75 2025-12-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f11821235c6c37a7e7d7af5/771852ab-9866-4534-862e-5d84fcca84b0/Screenshot+2025-11-14+at+17.10.25.png Interviews + Reviews - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.holly-stevenson.co.uk/bio/cv daily 0.75 2026-03-31