Erin Elise Holland
Bio: Erin Holland creates relational offerings through photography, video, performance and installation. Her practice weaves silence, touch, absence and presence into deeply personal works, most recently seen in the film Mother Mother, about the hardship and richness of long-term caregiving. Holland formerly worked as an art director and producer for The Museum of Modern Art while engaging in community projects led by MoMA Pop Rally, Creative Time and Public Art Fund. Her work will soon screen at In Response: Jonas Mekas on May 15, 2022, at The Jewish Museum.
erineliseholland.com
Instagram: @erineliseholland
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: In 2010, with great encouragement from my mother, I moved to New York City to pursue a job in the arts. That same year, at home in Abilene, Texas, my mother’s health began to decline. Her diagnosis remained unknown for some time. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” The following decade proved magical, unexpected, and devastating: My life as an artist blossomed, while I lost more and more of my mother to dementia.
During the global unraveling of 2020, I returned home to help with my mother’s care. I sat in stillness and solitude with her—a quietude New York had never offered. It nurtured revelation in me. The core elements of her external space— silence, light, and soft domesticity—breathed deeply into my spirit. Living in Abilene, resting on my mother’s furnishings in her airy house, brought balance to my frenetic life. Peace folded itself into my daily rhythms and offered healing.
This peace is now the cloak to which I cling. On March 5th, 2022, my mother died unexpectedly at home in Texas. Her absence and presence are felt palpably through the room in this exhibition, which mirrors a studio where she once taught piano lessons, filling our house with classical music and hymns. It is not an exact mimicry of her space, but rather a faint trace of its feeling, where light and silence hold sacred potential.
L to R: Piano Room (144" x 132.5" x 204.5", Acrylic paint, carpeting, 2022); Four Barn Swallows (03:00 minutes, Single-channel video, color, sound, 2022); Interior Code: Benjamin Moore 1376 (9" x 12" x 1.5", Family archive photograph, paint swatch, wooden frame, acrylic paint, 2022); The Space Between (No. 1), (44" x 31", Archival pigment print, 2021); Mother Mother (05:38 minutes, Single-channel video, color, sound, 2022); Two Weeks (05:00 minutes, Single-channel video, color, sound, 2022)
First Year Exhibition
Mother Mother (5:43 min,Video (color, sound), 2021)
