Exhibitions

Artist Statement

When I was a little girl, I found a tiny cobalt blue pitcher almost completely buried in my grandmother’s back yard. Gammy dug it up for me and that was the beginning of my love for small objects.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed collecting small items such as trinkets, bottles, tins, buttons, and boxes that sparked my interest and imagination. Over the years, my grandmothers, aunts, and family friends helped me develop a collection of tiny perfume bottles. As a result of these early collections I began accumulating other small objects, such as percolator tops, beads, buttons, fuses, ceramic objects—anything small and curious.

I also enjoy taking apart mechanical devices, such as clocks, adding machines, typewriters, and music boxes. I enjoy combining these parts, along with keys, locks, and other assorted hardware with the more delicate objects to make assemblages that make visual sense to me. As I choose material to build a piece, a narrative comes about that seems to flow from the interplay of objects.

I find my material in salvage yards, thrift shops, the side of the road, wherever I see things that have an interesting shape and are made of interesting materials. As an amateur woodworker, I also create a lot of scrap wood that is useful in making assemblages and sculpture. Most of the material I use in my work is recycled or salvaged, including recycled wood and frames wherever I can.

In addition to these more narrative pieces, I have recently begun doing more sculptural pieces that contain juxtapositions of materials and texture without an obvious narrative. For me, these mosaics provide a sense of tidy enclosure comprised of salvaged bits and odds & ends from my workshop.

In a sense, my approach is like a bird making a nest—I use whatever I can find that seems to fit together. The result is an ambiguously coherent composition that can be interpreted by the viewer to read differently based on the viewer’s experiences, imagination, and memories.

I hope that all of my work invites close inspection and engages the viewer’s imagination.

Jonilou Holland
August 2012