Nathalie Hollis

Nathalie Hollis’ work constituted the fifth show of Incubator 21’s six-part exhibition programme. A recent graduate of the Royal Drawing School and Camberwell College of Arts, Hollis translates visual scenes into physical experiences through lyrical and expressive mark-making. Often drawing from theatre and performance, her work harnesses the urgency and dynamism of life in movement, articulating on paper lives moving in sticky synchronicity. 

Capturing the immediacy of the medium, her drawings tread the careful line between chaos and composure, dictated by intuitive and moment-to-moment decision making. Lovers and fighters feature predominantly in Hollis’ most recent work; bodies lose their boundaries and transmute to new forms bound by both tension and softness. Some of Hollis’ larger works are heavily layered; the drawings beneath and above wrestle with each other allowing moments and bodies in time to collide and become whole. There is a physicality, near-ferocity in Hollis’ mark-making, with each strike acting as the pulse of the work, putting it into living motion. As an artist, Hollis is fixated with the body and how language is lodged inside of it, a vehicle of expression and a site of translation.

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