Beautiful, demented, anarchic and free – I listened to Lonnie Holley everyday for six months. I’m not sure I completely recovered.— Nick Cave
Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley is an artist, musician, filmmaker and educator. Born in 1950 as the seventh of twenty-seven children he grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and is now based in Atlanta.
In 1979, Holley made his first sandstone carvings to mark the graves of family members killed in a house fire. He continued making sculptural forms from the same material as well as assemblages of found objects including umbrellas, wire, pipe, old cameras, crosses, driftwood and animal skulls. The sculptures numbered in the hundreds, spreading over the hill where Holley lived, next to Birmingham airport and into the woods, taking over neighbouring gardens and abandoned lots, which he later titled ‘the environment’.
Holley’s life and work is an improvisational practice manifested through drawing, painting, filmmaking, photography, performance and sound. His sculptures combine found materials with narratives that commemorate people, places and events and are displayed in museums across the US while his music is similarly born out of the sculptural layering of sound and language improvised and shaped in real time. Holley never performs the same song twice.
Image: Lonnie Holley at Orford Ness. Still from The Edge of What (2022).
The self-taught singer and sculptor from Alabama exists in a state of constant, spontaneous creativity. – Sean O’Hagan, The Observer
When he tells me his work is honouring “the ones that went before”, he is not only talking about the courage of the black civil rights leaders he holds in awe, but the resilience and determination of his parents and grandparents, whose physical labour is echoed in his work. – Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, 1 May 2022
In his songs, sung in Holley’s bluesy tone with an elegiac vibrato, the words flow from him with few pauses and no stumbles, a remarkable feat given that they’re improvised. “It's just about grabbing information, and then going into the gravity of information. Because if we don't use information, it sinks deeper and deeper within us, but it never goes anywhere.” He calls it “the ocean of thought”, a “never-ending depth of information” that he calls on. – Ben Luke, The Art Newspaper, 9 May 2022
After a turbulent youth, Holley started making sand sculptures in his late 20’s, and in time began working with found objects and painting. His found mediums are imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, combined into sculptures that commemorate and give narrative to places, people and events. References to the artist’s own childhood in the pre-Civil-Rights-era South are made pervasive through his process of material regeneration. –Something Curated, 9 May 2022
Credits
The Edge of What is commissioned and produced by Artangel.
Lonnie Holley's live performance is presented in collaboration between Artangel and Edel Assanti. With special thanks to Stone Nest.
Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
