Holly Graham is a South London-based artist, working with print and audio. Her work examines how memory and narrative shape collective histories. Bound up in this lies an interest in recording-mechanisms, documents, evidence and processes of editing – concerns rooted around a commitment to responsible story-telling and amplifying quiet histories. Recent exhibitions & projects include: ‘Within which all this is suspended: Acts of betrayal’, Contemporary Collaborations at Robert Young Antiques (2021); ‘What Looks to be a Piece of Fruit & Loose Teeth and Stinking Breath’, Southwark Park Galleries (2020–21); ‘No Winder You Canna Catch Fish’, Gaada, Shetland (2020); #FridayFact, Goldsmiths CCA, Online (2020). Graham’s talk will reflect on matters raised in her essay ‘Be/hold/en – A Duty of Care’, in ON CARE (London: MA BIBLIOTHEQUE, 2020). What of when representations of bodies inscribed with muddy and violent histories, racist histories and presents, are assembled and laid bare to testify, singularly or en masse; when they are duplicated, reprinted, replicated,
re-performed? Are the potentials of violence and/or agency embedded in the images also amplified? What are the responsibilities involved in their exposure and display? What protective measures are in place? And who cares anyway?
https://www.hollygraham.co.uk/
Holly Graham introduced the talk with her work Kodak https://www.hollygraham.co.uk/kodak
Holly Graham read from her essay Be/hold/en
https://www.hollygraham.co.uk/be-hold-en and talked about https://www.hollygraham.co.uk/sweet-swollen
A series of works that consider histories and legacies of sugar and slavery, taking as their starting point a pair of late 18th century ‘blackamoor’ sweetmeat bowls in Meissen porcelain, held within the Victoria and Albert Museum collection.
The works include a series of sugarlift etchings on steel, depicting the gesturing hands of these figurines and others similar in design, fabricated throughout Europe from 1765 onwards; alongside an audio piece of edited interviews with eight V&A African Heritage tour guides. These works were originally commissioned in 2018 for the Jerwood Visual Arts Project Space, located within the gallery café; and formed the starting point for an on-going body of work.
https://www.hollygraham.co.uk/green-fingers-ii After Harry Jacobs:
A body of work centred around studio images taken from the extensive archive of late South London-based photographer Harry Jacobs, now housed in the Lambeth Archives. The works in this series draw on an interest in how the studio, frequented largely by the Afro-Caribbean community from the 1950s through to the 1990s, acted throughout this period as a neutral flattened space, staging compressed narratives. In pulling backdrops and props to the foreground, the pieces seek to explore this notion of flattening and expansion both formally and thematically.
Holly Graham played the video of Green fingers 2.
A series of links posted throughout the lecture:
https://thenewinquiry.com/the-weather/
https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-090-fall2018/files/2015/01/Sharpe_In-the-Wake.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/21/reni-eddo-lodge-uk-book-charts-debate-racism-game-some-dont-want-to-play
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/projects/reconstructionwork/
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1974#.YZPnfJDP3OQ
https://badgirlsshortcourse.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/tina-campt-reading-complete.pdf
Conclusion: The lecture was very well received and Holly Graham emerged as a genuine talent who is putting forward a voice for people whose experiences have been marginalised in history and creating an archive for those experiences.
Rusty'sArtWerk 