Dissected Beauty

Jo Holland was born in England in 1971. She studied photography at Staffordshire University, completing her degree in 1993. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Nancy Victor Gallery, London (2006), Leeds City Art Gallery (2001-02) and Dean Clough, Halifax (1998), as well as group shows at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (1997), and the Musea de la Traronja, Spain (1996). In the final year of her studies Holland invented the photographic technique which largely defines the work she has produced in her fourteen years as a practising artist. Holland makes photographic prints without the intermediary of either camera or negative, directly exposing the object through the focusing lense onto what becomes a unique ilfochrome print. In this respect her work goes against the grain of much of contemporary photographic practice, which is dominated by the reproducibility of the medium and its digital manipulation. In 1994 Holland began to arrange the object on a glass plate, which takes the place of the absent negative, and which facilitated more complex compositions. As recently as 2005 she began painting onto these plates, creating a hybrid form of image-making between photography and painting.

Holland�s most recent series, Combined Unity (2006-07), she dissects the human placenta.

Simon Elmer

Website: Jo Holland
Contact email: mail@joholland.com