HOLLY HARRISON

Holly Harrison is a mixed-media artist who began her training in poetry, and it continues to inform her creative process. Her work combines painting, photography, drawing and collage.

She has a special interest in birds and has created several series with birds as the subject, including recent work focusing on starling murmurations. Begun during the pandemic, the murmur series combines the concept of social distancing with the internal workings of starlings, who fly at great speeds in dynamic formations due to their ability to track and adjust to as many as six or seven other birds. The collage and graphite circles in these paintings reference both the concept of six feet of social distancing and the starlings’ awareness of each other in flight.

While I have developed bodies of work that are abstract, where the relationships between visual elements are how I explore and create meaning, I keep returning to birds. They are just so interesting to me—familiar and part of everyday life and yet strange and wild and unknowable.