Artist 
Holly Block  

https://www.hollyblock.com.au/


When Holly gave me the all clear to include her work in my magazine, I was both excited and terrified.  Holly’s work transcends description in the way that a written language for art confronts the perplexing intangible need for making it in the first place.  It’s difficult not to know what these images are, and that uncomfortableness paired with the undefinable is quite frustrating.  If you start to play around with how these images are seen together, an evocation of the performative becomes what is tangible and you find yourself reaching in and wanting to touch these things.  Should I pull it?  I kind of want to wipe it away.  The glamour and the crude are culminating into provocative realisations that we all know what these images are; they’re beautiful,  performative windows in which superficial acts deploy resonance.   

Holly Blocks’ practice is multidisciplinary with a focus on video, photography, performance and sculpture. Block’s most recent practice explores the impact of technology on human courting rituals, practices and behaviour sexually and socially. Her oeuvre has deployed reoccurring motifs of hair, skin and hairlessness to explore notions of other, embodiment and representation. Block’s background in psychology and choreography inform her interest in the performance of gender and identity and seek to reveal the instability of these states. Her work suggests that as much as these performances are for others they are also performed for ourselves and this slippery oscillation between the personal and the social imbue her work with a uncanny resonance.

Holly Block lives and works in Melbourne, Australia and is a currently studying her Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at MARS gallery and Seventh Gallery, is currently exhibiting in ARTJOG, Indonesia, and has also exhibited at Spring 1883 (MARS suite), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne),, Trocadero Art Space (Melbourne), Melbourne Fringe Festival, Darwin Visual Arts Association (Darwin) and Dirty Dozen. She was a recipient of the 2019 VCA ACCESS mentorship award, has been awarded an arts grant for Maribrynong Council and in 2013 she established the women’s arts collective Tribe for Art.