Holly Fay

Holly Fay: Floating Worlds

Curated by Wendy Peart

Imagin(in)g

by Wendy Peart

Whether produced by artists, scientists, historians, or spiritualists, ancient

cultures have left evidence to our proclivity towards knowledge, self-awareness,

and speculation through an array of artworks and artifacts, mostly in the form

of drawings, paintings, or carvings on stone, wood, or other natural materials.

These prehistoric works, although culturally distinct, reveal a common tendency

towards physical, spiritual, or nature-based inquiry, demonstrating our

deeply inquisitive human nature as well as our inclination to observe, record,

hypothesize, dream, and invent.

In a similar vein, the work of artist Holly Fay has been invested in the exploration

of visual and natural phenomenologies. As a painter and drawer, Fay’s work

“oscillate(s) between something that is representational and abstract,” denying

her images anchored bearings or stationed subjects, but hovering over, or

alluding to what those subjects are or could be.1 As such, her work questions

fixed positions of knowledge and is more subsumed by the shifting processes and

systems of “knowingness.”

Floating Worlds, Fay’s latest body of work, represents a three-year ongoing study.

Following her previous series, Systems, which more directly alluded to biological

and propagative structures using a developed lexicon of repeated, organically

shaped forms, this new work is progressively more abstract but increasingly more

referential. Floating Worlds is comprised of the titular series of graphite drawings

on paper, as well as a series of oil on paper paintings, As Above, So Below. For

Fay, the graphite drawings mark an important focus on the immediacy of raw

mark-making, application, and manipulation of media on surface. The images

are formed through a series of clustered marks, often smudged but held together

by some imperial force, producing cloud-like, globular entities. Radiating from

and connecting these clusters are a series of irregular strokes combined with

surgically straight lines, implying a kind of chaotic order within explosive, yet

lolling gestures.

It is no coincidence that Fay’s graphite work bears a palpable resemblance to

the drawing studies of Leonardo da Vinci, found in countless sketchbooks, and

borne from his insatiable thirst for investigating the physical world through

representation. It is this quest that Fay correlates in her work.2 The paintings

depict swirling, cloud-like entities — grey and tar-coloured— resembling air,

water, smoke or the combinations of all three. Da Vinci too, made numerous

studies of air and water currents dynamically flowing through landscapes and

other made-made structures in his attempt to capture natural phenomena in

motion, as a dynamic process.3 Similarly, Fay’s work bears this connection to

nature, to the land, sea, and sky, as well as to the processes of change, mutability,

flow, and combustion.

Fay’s graphite work also makes striking reference to the traditions of ancient

Asian scroll landscape paintings, wherein bodies of land and water float solitarily

within the negative space of the picture plane. Fay’s clustered objects bear this

characteristic “float,” along with her visual allusions to the land, rolling hills,

and reflections in bodies of water. For Fay, this negative, empty space is just as

important as the positive, object-filled space. The emptiness of the picture plane

is what really denotes the ambiguity paramount in the work. The “space” in and

around her figures is perhaps what leaves the viewer questioning the locational

space of the work. Where is this? What am I looking at? Through what lens is

this picture focused?

Da Vinci did not have the advantage of microscopic or telescopic lenses through

which to investigate the world, although if he had been born just a half-century

later, he might have. His world was limited to the observable Universe, what

was visible through the naked eye. This is certainly not the case any longer. The

vast array of image producing systems created in last few centuries make visible

to us what has never been seen before: from the microscopic, infinitesimal level

of atomic imaging to the macroscopic, infinite scale of astronomical imaging.

With this range and with this capacity, it is clear that we are still bound to our

inquisitive nature, and still swimming in the chasm of knowledge-seeking.

Fay’s work, too, shares an affinity with these advanced images. Her graphite

drawings could be renderings of absorption nebulae (dense interstellar clouds

which absorb light from behind), microscopic images of pond water, or perhaps

atomic particles at the lower end of the nanoscale. Or, are they clouds in the

sky or islands in the sea? This complexity and multiplicity is key to Fay’s work.

Her work subtly addresses all things physical, which in the same respect, slides

quickly into the metaphysical, asking two fundamental questions: What is

ultimately there and what is it like?

For Fay, the systems of the microscopic and macroscopic, abiotic and biotic,

ordered and chaotic have similar and repetitive forms, all of which inform her

work, in what she refers to as a series of “emergent patterns within ecology.”4 Her

allusive subjects, which may simultaneously be water, air, microscopic particles,

globular star clusters, cellular matter, or cumulous clouds lead to a recognition

of wholeness, of all things combined, interconnected, and never one without the

other.

1 Holly Fay, email correspondence with the author, April 27, 2015.

2 Holly Fay, interview with the author, April 20, 2015.

3 Johannes Nathan and Frank Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci: The Graphic Work. (Cologne: TASCHEN, 2011), 514 .

4 Holly Fay, Artist Statement – Current Work. Artist’s website, accessed April 20, 2015, http://hollyfay.com/gallery/

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