Holly Robert’s work combines photography and paint in a way that allows her to achieve more than either one would alone. Independently, they may have a certain beauty or power, but by joining them together she is able to find the complex, double reality that has become her visual language.
One writer has said her imagery is ‘sprung loose from a subconscious Pandora’s Box’, that it is ‘unsettling, disturbing or naively wild’. Others have talked about angst or alienation, and still others have said that, at times, it can be funny. When asked about the meaning of her work, Roberts says “All I can say is that the work mirrors something I need, for whatever reason, to tell about. Almost always there seems to be something in the image about death or pain or fright or something gone wrong. There is always an edge or a bite, something that attracts me more than just beauty. It’s like the best humor: there always has to be something at least a little bit black or frightening to make it really work”.
In 2003 Roberts took a year hiatus from her work. When she started working again her methods were reversed. For years she had painted over photographs to make figures engaged in a narrative; now she paints abstractions, then uses the painted surface as background, and the narrative is made exclusively from her own photographic fragments. The themes of this new work are somewhat different: less personal and more about humanity, as depicted in myths and as represented by contemporary society and more about the state of our world and what we are doing to nature. Much of the work may be humorous on one level, but quite horrifying on another. What is apparent from viewing Roberts’ latest work is that no matter how much she has changed, some things remain the same: an intrigue with the photo, a love of paint, and a desire to state simple truths in an original way.
