Holly Harrison

In 2021, I began working on a painting series that explores social distancing. I often feature birds in my work, and during the pandemic, I found myself thinking about the murmurations of starlings that are a favorite subject. I have long been fascinated by how masses of starlings can swoop and fly almost as one body, careening through the air by the hundreds and yet never crashing into each other. Scientists have learned that this is due to their ability to visually track up to six to seven other birds nearby, so they have a constant awareness of each other as they fly.

As we masked up for grocery store runs and stood in lines six feet apart, I began to wonder how our pandemic experiences will change our sense of personal space. Will we internalize the six feet in some way that sticks? When does habit become instinct? Is this a watershed moment in our human development or will this spatial awareness just fade away after we no longer need the distance for safety?

To me these questions felt connected to the starlings and their innate tracking abilities, which I in my imagination became a kind of radiating circle, expanding out from each bird. As I began to make new murmuration paintings, I added circles of paper and graphite, representing both the awareness between starlings and our own pandemic-era internalization of social distance.

I began using bird imagery in my artwork over a decade ago, inspired by one of my favorite poems, Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have used bird murmurations and birds on wires in two separate series. In Strata, they are one of many visual elements within heavily collaged, horizontally striped paintings. And in The Language of Lines, painted and collaged stripes add energy and rhythm to a single bird-related image.  

A couple of years ago, I curated a show on birds at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts. In Bird: metaphor + muse, I pulled together a group of wonderful artists working in various media, all focused on birds in rich and meaningful ways. A strong undercurrent to the show was a concern with the fragility of birds and the ways in which humans have impacted their habitats and populations. As climate change becomes more of a clear-cut threat to the planet, it is clear that birds are on the forefront: their populations are declining in surprisingly large numbers. 

Concern with climate change continues to feed my interest in depicting birds in my artwork. I am beginning work on some larger pieces that focus on murmurations. I would like for people to stand before a wall of birds, so close that they could touch them. I would like for people to see the wildness and beauty of these creatures and to be reminded that they are worth protecting.

My training in the arts began in poetry, which continues to inform almost every aspect of my artistic process. Part of an ongoing series, the Poetic Grid paintings are semi-abstract collage compositions that are akin to visual poems. Fields of color alternate with fields of collage; and meaning is created and gleaned through the resonant conversations that occur between them. 

The materials I use are a mix of papers both random and meaningful that have been obscured with layers of paint: old shopping lists, vintage comics, book and magazine pages, printed papers, junk mail, my daughter’s early doodles, pieces of my husband’s works on paper, etc. (In the studio, nothing is safe.) Pulled from many places, these elements bring with them a sense of story. The wash of paint acts to join the disparate pieces and also to obscure their content, so that what remains is more of an impression or hint, asking the viewer to look more closely.

This series continues the approach I developed for the Poetic Grid paintings, but with a narrower focus, sourcing images that were “moon-like” but not actually moons from the reams of junk mail and catalogs that come in the mail. Many of these are playful experiments that try to find beauty in something that is disposable, not necessarily even asked for or wanted, before it heads to the recycling bin.

Reaching for the Moon and Blue Moon were included in the exhibition Moon: Eternal Pearl at Concord Art a few years ago. When asked by the curators, “Why the moon?” My answer was this: When I was little, my German grandfather gave my family a book about the race to the moon. I found it at my mom’s house a few years ago and brought it home for my daughter, who at the time loved anything related to outer space. My uncle, who (like my mother) had immigrated to the US after WW II, was a lifelong NASA engineer. As I began work on the Poetic Grid series, with its focus on incorporating vintage papers, I knew I would want to take apart the moon book. The iconic imagery and family connection were irresistible. My uncle passed away last year, and as I worked on these moon paintings, I found myself thinking about a shy young man whose life was shaped by great historical forces.

This series is about the ways in which people will collect and quantify other species, in this instance taxidermy birds housed at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Some extinct birds, the most famous being the passenger pigeon (which was once plentiful but was hunted into extinction in the early 20th century), only exist now in glass museum cases.

The Strata paintings are an early series, in which I created bands of pattern, texture and imagery, juxtaposing the elements to create a sense of narrative. In some cases I wrote in texts, quoted lines from favorite poems, referencing the importance that poetry has played in my development as a visual artist.

This series began with A Fine Romance, when I became intrigued by row of collage at the top to the painting. It reminded me of the jagged lines of a heart monitor or sound wave. Music is an important part of my studio practice, I almost always listen to music while working (sometimes just the same album on repeat). So I started to play around with it: What happens when it is turned on its side as more of a stack? What happens when the individual lines have more heft? How does the collage relate to the striped underpainting? What kind of rhythms are created when they are in parallel vs crossing each other?

I generally like working in a series especially if I’m interested in exploring a specific theme or idea. Working on multiples and variations is a great way to deepen my work, plus it means I’m not entering my studio every day having to come up with something totally new. Sometimes a series will be ongoing for me, and I’ll spend years exploring a theme. And sometimes I end up just making a few pieces before I become interested in something else. These small series explore different ideas but have in common my interest in exploring media, collage, and using everyday materials like thread, window screen or junk mail to create something new. When I’m working, I’m always thinking about the relationships between elements and how they work together to imply (or outright state) different narratives. The passenger pigeon and tiger portraits came out of my interest in learning more about extinct species. The other pieces here are more or less from a series where I was experimenting with abstraction (mostly) and incorporating machine sewing into my work.

I created this project in 2020, during the pandemic, when I found myself struggling with profound creative block. The reflective space of my studio made it hard to avoid feeling sadness and worry, and I found myself shutting down and unable to paint.

Until her school figured out how to manage classes , my daughter was adrift, too, so we began renovating an old dollhouse we had once picked up as a project. We decided to use only what we had on hand for renovating and furnishing the house. And while I did have a box full of vintage miniatures, a lot of pieces were broken, so we had to improvise: packing material and wood and fabric scraps became a chair; layers of paint transformed thick paper into floor tiles; and a bottle cap and a broken earring found new life as a sparkly chandelier.

After my daughter was busy with online school, I kept working, finding peace in the process of using whatever I had on hand to re-create the world in miniature. I broke our rule a few times, buying wood edge banding to make hardwood floors and a couple of special things off of Etsy, but mostly I stuck with it.

As I worked on this unexpected project, I began to make objects to represent everyday pandemic experiences: a mask-sewing station (and tiny masks), Clorox wipes (for wiping down groceries and surfaces), a bag of flour (for at-home baking), toilet paper rolls (for hoarding!), jigsaw puzzles (a surprising pandemic trend), and desk with a laptop (for working from home).

Even though working on the house had become my safe place, I couldn’t ignore what was happening in the world. Along with the growing devastation of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement had exploded after the death of George Floyd. I made reading materials to reference these events: in the living room, Trump’s COVID denial on the cover of The New Yorker, Time magazine’s Black Lives Matter issue, and The New York Times listing the COVID dead by name; and in the bedroom, a copy of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on the nightstand (with tiny reading glasses, of course).

A friend encouraged me to post photos on Instagram. The project really struck a chord with people, and they noticed and delighted in all of the details. As the dollhouse evolved, friends dropped off things they thought I could use, artists mailed me tiny artworks, and a friend’s poet dad gave me the project title. Reflecting on how for many of us our homes had become places of refuge in scary and turbulent times, he offered up the words “where safety lives”.