Warning_Final_Captioned from Joanna Holland on Vimeo.
Video above: warning, 2023, 3 minutes 40 seconds, courtesy of the artist, creative captioning by Chloe Page.
In Flux: Sickness as practice and landscapes as freedom
Please note that the audio becomes quite loud at 9:43.
In this podcast we join artist-curator Joanna Holland (she/her) in conversation with Senior Programmes Curator John Bloomfield (he/him) to discuss Joanna’s recent exhibition Out of the Blue, and aspects of her Wysing residency which took place from 2020-2023.
Her residency extended over a long period as it worked around several flares of chronic illness and three hospitalisations. The residency moved with Joanna, back and forth from the ‘blue’ spaces of hospital to the ‘green’ spaces of Wysing.
During her residency, Joanna researched narratives of [in]visible disability. Throughout this period she was in dialogue with several crip identifying and Disabled artists whose practices explore inclusive landscapes. These included Caroline Cardus, Leah Clements, Suzie Larke, Sam Metz, Bella Milroy, Geneveive Rudd, Dolly Sen & R A Walden. Conversations included thinking around societal hegemonies, the disruption of binary narratives, exploration of non-verbal means of communication, and participatory experience through dissenting and critical provocations.
Simultaneously, Joanna experienced severe chronic fatigue, catching first wave COVID on top of pre-existing conditions. This dictated a move away from her longstanding participatory practice towards a practice which was not reliant on a physical body being present, but which could remain socially engaged. Supportive conversations with other artists during this time were invaluable. What started out as a curatorial residency transmuted into an artistic one as Joanna developed her own practice in Wysing’s polyphonic studio—as an artist working remotely in video and sound.
Joanna’s debut solo show Out of the Blue – landscapes of chronic illness emerged from her residency at Wysing. The Arts Council funded exhibition contemplates what it is to live a life disrupted, sharing lived experience of chronic illness through video, soundscapes, photographs and light sculptures.
Part real and part imagined, Joanna’s different landscapes consider notions of stress & solace, the synthetic & the natural, the seen & the unseen, the real & the imagined and the participatory body & the remote body. Artworks share very real experiences of diagnosis, medication, side effects, chronic fatigue, hospitalisation, and the impact of [in]visible disability on family life. They also explore an interconnectedness with nature, and the complex entanglements between self, planetary health, climate change and biodiversity loss.
It toured to Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester and originalprojects, Great Yarmouth in 2023. Click here to listen to audio descriptions from the exhibition.
About Joanna
Joanna is a socially engaged research-artist and curator. She’s interested in how we can live more equitably with each other and our planet. Her multidisciplinary practice builds on her background in feminist art histories, cultural inclusion, and biodiversity conservation.
Joanna explores notions of presence and absence in the making of culture and has worked for/with, amongst others, Attenborough Arts Centre, Cambridge Conservation Initiative, Cambridge Curiosity & Imagination, originalprojects, The National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts, the RNIB and SENSE. She’s been funded by ACE, Artists Newsletter, SHAPE, & Unlimited. She lives in Cambridgeshire with her family and her ravenous cat. You can see exhibition artworks and find out more at: www.hollandsyntax.uk or on Instagram: @joanna_k_holland