Gift Culture – Holly Story

Our next Gift Culture recipient is WA visual artist Holly Story. Holly works in a number of mediums – including printmaking, embroidery, installation, video and sculpture – working with local, natural materials out of a finely-turned sensitivity to the natural world and its forces.

I experience Holly’s work as a real “Speaking of the Bush” – a real “Speaking of Country” – that enables audiences/viewers to experience this same speaking for themselves. In so doing she helps open a connection to all that lives in WA’s natural environment – connections out of which creative forces of social renewal can also flow.

I believe Holly is engaged in an ongoing perfection of nature not through imitation or manipulation, but through imagination – through the creativity of the human being. Art as the perfection of nature (Sir Thomas Browne). And we are all artists today (Beuys), at least potentially.

Holly’s exhibition Look Both Ways is currently on at Turner Galleries, 470 William St, Northbridge, every day until 5pm Saturday, October 20.

Holly has said she wants to put the $50 gift towards the following project: “I have had an idea for a while to produce a number of posters or cards from an image I produced earlier this year, it’s a Banksia “offering” work (see image below). The idea is to find an opportunity to include it in an appropriate event where the posters/cards would be available for people to take away, and there would be a small bit of writing somewhere on the card raising awareness about the loss of Banksia woodland that is going on on the Perth coastal plain as development spreads. I would be really pleased to accept your offer to go towards printing these.”

Holly’s website is also a work of art: www.hollystory.com

John.

“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone (for Banksia woodland)”. H. Story, 2012. Digital photograph of construction from B. grandis flower and leaves of 3 species of Banksia found near Perth, Western Australia. The term “Banksia woodland” describes an ecosystem of great delicacy and diversity, endemic to the coastal plain of the SW of Western Australia and disappearing fast as urban hinterlands grow and grow, carelessly engulfing their own future. The poet’s song says it all. (With thanks to Joni Mitchell.) Click on image to enlarge.