I AM IN OSTRICH

D Contemporary is pleased to present I am an Ostrich, a solo exhibition by Laura Holmes (b. 2000, Norwich, UK). This marks the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Holmes uses her practice to explore and investigate her relationship with painting itself. Her work unravels experiences, observations, objects, and memories, which she extends beyond the canvas. It's a compulsion, kept in check by a set of rules, thoughts, and rituals surrounding painting.

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She makes paintings about the way that she makes paintings, but she makes her paintings as if they are sculptures. This is the only thing she can sustain enough interest in to propel her practice. She challenges painting. Laura has been gathering a list of experiences that have felt the same way that she intends for painting to feel. They felt how her paintings themselves could potentially feel like. Her paintings are an attempt to recreate the mood of these things and translate them all into a new coherent space.

Her paintings have become landscape adjacent. They are spaces.

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'I paint. I am an artist. I construct paintings as if they are sculptures or spaces. I excavate problems of painting.

Reach into my paintings please.I find joy in impossible aims.It's fun to reach for the stars and then crash back to reality.

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With painting like this being such an inherently selfish activity, it needs a touch of the absurd. Painting is, and should be, fun(ny). 

How can I make a show that feels the same as watching clouds? How do I construct paintings with a mood that's the same as dancing in the street at midnight with music so loud the inside of  my head is quiet, or how it feels to cook without a recipe. How can painting be a soup, and how can that soup fall from the sky? What does that look like as painting? What mood does it have?

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Painting is like cooking. Painters are like chefs. I play with my food. 

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I am aiming to find whatever ‘painting beyond itself’ actually is; Painting that is better than my last. It's a game to reassign meaning to this phrase. A puzzle with no real answers. The game of painting is limitless. I want my painting to possess space that is both internal and external to the canvas. Every tiny weave of canvas in Laura’s painting arena has been considered. She is aiming to use the canvas to her advantage, to trick the eye, to paint iridescently, before methodically and metaphorically pushing her painting off a cliff. She ruins it so that she is faced with the challenge of saving it. Language is futile when collating the moods and experiences of this show into one thing. What I am aiming for is so individual and specific and intangible and impossible. I've just been calling it a feeling of ‘ostrich’. In this show, and whilst making these paintings, ‘I am in ostrich’ 

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I AM  IN OSTRICH
A solo exhibition by Laura Holmes 
18 October-16 November 2024