holly valance
for Reflections Of Home
as part of Rotterdam Design Biennale
curated by Bolaji Teniola
20 feb- 2 march 2025
For the second iteration of Reflections Of Home, an ensemble of Australian-based creatives will showcase works revolving around the theme of 'Material and Culture' as part of the inaugural Rotterdam Design Biennale. Curated by Bolaji Teniola, this exhibition will focus on material observation.
As designers, artists, craftspeople, and makers develop in their practice, so too does their understanding of their chosen medium. An arguably potential catalyst for this materiality-based discovery and development could be a conscious or subconscious response influenced by life experience and the environment in which each individual's creativity has been nurtured.
The select group of creatives, although just a slice of the vast Australian contemporary design and art scene, all approach their mediums in a way that either enhances, challenges or subverts the conventional possibilities of their chosen material.
holly valance, 2025
Executive dysfunction disrupts clear thinking, causing resolved work to feel inconceivable. Windows upon windows, tabs upon tabs, losing the window to the dock and starting a new one, unable to keep up, descending into overwhelmed freeze.
Sifting through childhood obsessions, I realised I’ve always functioned within a rapid haze of chaotic notions that’s simultaneously paired with a painful resistance to change; once a fixation was planted, it stuck, creating a debilitating dichotomy.
Pulling the fixations from my memory as beacons through the confusion and furious influx of options, I use the resistance to change as a method of decision-making, provoking the brain into productive pathways.
At 8 I obsessed over making beds. I wove headboards from sticks and wool; hand-sewed a cushion to place in a cast iron verandah post-anchor that remained after our house underwent renovation. This partial demolition of my childhood space caused a lot of confusion. I clung to the rubble, keeping broken parts of lost architectural features. Mum became concerned about the beds being perfect nesting spots for mice; I think I was clinging to familiarity, fighting with the known being swept away. Did I need my surroundings to remain constant because my mind could not?
What does your material choice say about you?
That I’m trying to organise mayhem. That I’m looking for a practice that can be engaged amidst constant distraction, the feeding of fast-paced facts (or non-facts), endless information, brief obsessions and quick shifts. That striving for total coherence and concise systems is a venture done in vain. Materials that allow me to make through many processes at once- metal-fabricating, woodworking, casting, electronics, sewing. Rapid changes of direction in interest, a bench covered in small beginnings and incompleteness. Starting to learn it all at once, all the separate moments of intrigue, arranging them together in absurdist moments that engage themselves through futile motion and maybe make you smirk. It’s all we can aim for, to anchor through the rapids.