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 into new forms bound by both tension and softness. Some of her larger works are heavily layered, with the drawings beneath and above wrestling with each other—allowing moments and bodies in time to collide and become whole.

There is a physicality, a near-ferocity in Hollis’ mark-making, with each strike acting as the pulse of the work, putting it into living motion. As an artist, she is fixated on the body and how language is lodged inside it—a vehicle of expression and a site of translation.