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Holly Wilshere

Fine Art

They/Them

I am a multimedia artist based in the East Midlands whose work explores personal and societal narritives through a queer, Crip lens.
Two silhouettes of faces face away from each other. The one on the left is made of black felt with copper wires and shattered sequins stitched over it. Along the back of the head runs a red and white shredded charging cable. The right head is made of red felt with a layer of white plastic net over it. The words “thinking myself into breathing, will it be worth it, learn how to cope” stitched in blue thread. A iridescent hoop sits in the middle the words “can’t do this alone” stitched with white thread in the centre.
A central figure lays on a bed turned away from the viewer. The bed is lifted in the air by roots coming from a hole in the ground. The sheets of the bed are made from old brown medicine prescription bags. A prominent “place label here” direction is at the foot of the bed”. Above the figure held by the branches of a tree is a yellow screen reading “Patient” followed by a jumble of numbers. In the background is a shadowy forest in various shades of green created through overlapping tree shapes.
An under-lit face made of translucent red, blue and purple shapes looks out. Under the face red veins branch around the page.

Practice

My mixed media practice is focussed around 3 main themes: communication, systems, and narratives. With my personal experience as a disabled, queer artist I am led to investigate hidden narratives, the ways in which language can not fully communicate, and how many systems are broken or actively hostile. This includes  recording my own and others practical experiences of this. The techniques I use range from textiles to drawing and enamelling metal, with a focus on outsider media such as zines or objects often created in hospitals or asylums, like needle work. 

A tall thin medicine box has been cut open and had a chunky copper chain attached. Inside the box are three pieces of paper. The first on the upper left side read in neatly typed text “the days blend together, sometimes I’m so tired my vision foggs like a window. I haven’t had a migraine in a while I’m just stuck with a cotton candy brain and a body of rocks and barbed wire”. The bottom of the piece of paper has a black and white drawing of an alarm clock and open pill organiser. The lower left paper, which is more tattered than the other, reads “when time stops working what can I do”? The last piece of paper on the right has another black and white drawing of a figure in bed with the cover pulled up over their chin. The figures eyes look off to the side and their face looks worried.
A red monochrome drawing on gridded paper. It shows a labyrinth like structure with a central space that branches outwards. It is shaded in a way that looks very fleshy and organ like. In the paths there are different blocks and shapes some of which look like trees or clots of tissue.
On paper with a small red grid multiple roughly printed black stars with the word “special” carved out of them appear. Some of these feature printed text underneath related to the experience of growing up disabled and the artists feeling about being called “special”

Degree show

The degree show is acting as a document of my declining health over the last year. From trying to find materials and scales of work that help me sustain my practice to exploring how it has affected me and employing ideas and inspirations that have helped me through, such as the carrier bag theory of fiction. The pieces are designed to interconnect visually and thematically, standing alone as detailed objects and together as fragments of a whole. I hope to provide tools for others to start expressing their narratives through the pill box theatre worksheet and instructions on my link tree. 

Two number scales in red are on the page both going from one to ten. The top one starts with a small blue blob beneath the one and an exploding layer of red symbols by the ten. The bottom one starts with a cartoony smiling face in blue by the one and has an abstract half exploded face by the ten.
A black and white work sheet for making a theatre from a pill box with a qr code for further instructions.
Embroidery of red and blue veins, some of them in metallic threads covers the top of the red felt bag. A red zip sits above pleated white lace teeth. Covered in shining beads and sequins a large red felt tongue sticks out from the bags opening.
Inky grey sky sits at the top of the page moving down into a darker choppy looking ocean. In the middle of the picture a figure stands out mostly left white with a few black lines of detail. They are floating on the water their left foot completely submerged, due to the angle we cannot see their face.

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