Holly Holmes @ Bert Green Fine Art

Nature’s Wonder: A Review of Holly Holmes at Bert Green Fine Art

January 18, 2025 – March 15, 2025

Standing in the middle of a small room on a dark February afternoon surrounded by Holly Holmes’ shaggy wall hangings, I started to wonder if our culture’s Calvinist residue is to blame for making critics and curators reflexively suspicious of art that wears its heart on its sleeve. Only work that requires effort to decode is worth our time and attention, or so the assumption goes. Cling to that tenet too diligently, and you’ll overlook some exhibits in moments when you need them the most.

Best known for her vibrant paintings of large, enigmatic shapes that obliquely reference the built and natural environment, Holmes’ practice has been primarily focused on exploring the “friction of translation” between representation and abstraction. Several years ago, the artist started creating corollary wall hangings out of yarn using DIY techniques popularized on social media. She has been showing these tufted hangings alongside her paintings in recent exhibits, sparking dialogue around the ways in which different materials and processes shape the expression and reception of an artwork’s message.

At Bert Green Fine Art, Holmes is exhibiting seven of her newest wall hangings (all but one completed in 2025). Installed without any companion paintings, the show reflects the artist’s growing confidence in the conceptual and technical strength of the tufted works. It also heralds the arrival of a new instrument in Holmes’ toolbox: a microscope.

Not content with chronicling the macro-level environments through which she travels, Holmes has decided to go deeper, into the parts that are hidden from view. Armed with small glassine bags and jars, she collects odds and ends from her surroundings, examines them with her microscope and makes sketches of what she sees through the eyepiece. She then translates those sketches into the tufted wall hangings, streamlining the granular details of the magnified image into simple lines, circles and patches of saturated color. All the works at Bert Green are based on samples collected regionally, in Illinois and Michigan.

Holmes’ approach to her subject matter is ecumenical. She is as fascinated by pollen grains and plankton as she is by fibers of plastic. “Primary Plankton” and “Wonderment Found in Water” both have the unmistakable outlines of organisms found in aquatic environments. The tight concentric circles in “Looking to the Yard” suggest instead that we may be looking at some sort of synthetic material.

While she is not interested in faithfully reproducing every membrane layer or organelle on her slide, or systematically categorizing her specimens, Holmes nevertheless operates within the artist-naturalist tradition that abides by abolitionist and poet Lucy Larcom’s famous quote: “A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.”

Similarly, every decision Holmes makes about her project—from the samples she collects to the weaving techniques she adopts, from the soft and bright yarns she selects to the functionality of the tufted pieces (durable enough to serve as a rug)—radiates enthusiasm for the tiniest details of the world and advocates for our accessibility to the experience of that knowledge. She insists, and repeatedly proves, that rekindling our sense of wonder about the world around us takes little more than curiosity and patient observation.

It’s an inviting prescription for finding meaning and belonging because it reminds us of our agency. What better antidote to the gray days of late winter and the chaos mushrooming from our nation’s capital?

(Published in Newcity, February 25, 2025)