Holly Slingsby: APPROACHING VIRIDITAS (EPILOGUE)
Holly Slingsby: APPROACHING VIRIDITAS (EPILOGUE)
Preview: 5-7pm, Friday 27 September 2019
Open: 12-4pm, 28 September - 6 October 2019
An egg that won't crack. A mermaid who wants to do the splits. A breast that won't lactate. A pelican that pecks itself.
Approaching Viriditas (Epilogue) is a new performance-to-camera video work, building on a series of live works made in 2018. These works develop a language to discuss the experience of fertility treatment.
Viriditas is a concept associated with the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen - a notion of spiritual 'greening' which here is applied to the female body. Performative action is layered with readings of Hildegard's texts, and coded watercolour drawings.
This work is supported by a bursary from a-n The Artists Information Company; and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
This exhibition is part of Margate NOW, an ambitious and dynamic festival of art, events and performances. This year, in response to Turner Prize 2019 at Turner Contemporary the programme runs from 28 September 2019 - 12 January 2020. It has been developed by Turner Contemporary, Margate Festival, Open School East, 1927, Resort, Crate, Limbo, Dreamland Margate, Kent County Council and Kent Libraries, Thanet District Council and locally based artists. It is supported by Arts Council England through National Lottery funding, as well as contributions from Kent County Council, Thanet District Council and Dreamland Margate. Turner Prize 2019 is organised in collaboration with Tate.
Holly Slingsby (born 1983, UK) is based in Margate, UK. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University (2003-06) and the Slade School of Art, London (2008-10). Her practice centres on performance and uses props, costumes and video. Her most recent work explores the female body in relation to fertility myths and medicine. Slingsby reinvents depictions of mythical and holy figures, playfully proposing embodiment of these characters as a form of invocation. She draws on a wealth of art historical and contemporary imagery to create her own irreverent yet thought-provoking visual language. Holly is a studio holder at CRATE.
