Plinth

Walking into the Camden Art Centre show, we are first introduced to Holley’s work through a series of curious assemblages. Rendered from twisted wire, copper, brick, organic remnants and discarded manmade items, the fabrications appear to be as delicate as they are cumbersome, as gestural as they are rigid. An amalgam of industrial debris (referencing the industrial landscape of Birmingham itself), Holley’s raw and rusted sculptures are typically held together with a plinth of brick or stone – sometimes even padlocks, chains and remnants of disused mechanical parts. Unpolished and disquieting, they electrify in the formal exhibition space.

Now in the fourth decade of his artistic career, Holley is well established as an important yet somewhat ‘outsider’ figure in the history of American art. He has also built a career as an educator and musician. His motivations as an artist grew organically out of his impoverished and chaotic childhood, having been put to work from the age of five in order to survive. In the mid 1950s, before Holly had scarcely received an education, he was picking up trash, working in kitchens, digging graves for a living, and moving between several foster homes.
He was raised in a whiskey house on state fairgrounds, which according to Holley was a result of being traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four. The frequent use of discarded glass bottles in his work alludes to these early, troubled years – traces and remnants of his past.

As an artist, Holley is both a creator and collector. He compulsively sources materials from the urban wastelands and backstreets of Alabama, before recycling and monumentalising what was once left discarded. By doing this, he continues the art historical tradition of appropriating the found object, as seen in the American assemblages of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. ‘I find most of my material in the black area of Birmingham, but I also find material outside of the black area,’ as he once wrote (in a catalogue essay for Ikon gallery). ‘I go into the shopping malls, I go behind the stores, I go into the alleys, I go into the garbage cans, and I go into the neighbourhoods and take things that other people throw away.’

In 1979, Holley’s artistic life first set into motion when after the death of his sister’s two children in a tragic house fire, he carved tombstones from soft sandstone – a byproduct of metal casting that he sourced from Birmingham’s famous Sloss furnaces. The family couldn’t afford graves, so Holley took up the task – a transformative moment that set him on a new path. ‘It was like a spiritual awakening,’ he later said in an interview with the New York Times. ‘I had been thrown away as a child, and here I was building something out of unwanted things in memorial of my little nephew and niece. I discovered art as service.’

From then on, Holley would create art in the medium of sandstone, earning the nickname ‘Sand Man’ for his trademark cocoa-coloured sculptures. He later turned his home in Birmingham into an outdoor studio. But underpinning his practice there has always been an addiction to assemblages, or what he calls ‘placements’. In his own words, ‘I call them placements, when you place one thing on top of another thing. The two things come from different directions, but when you put them together they deliver a message.’ In this sense, Holley is a curator – as well as a creator and collector. In the mid-1980s, the collector Bill Arnett discovered the work of Holley when travelling through Alabama and quickly became his patron, bringing his practice to a broader audience. ‘The freedom came when Mr. Arnett came’, Holley later wrote. ‘We had something in common, because Bill had been a kind of curator, and he had done things that was trying to let the world know the constructed order from the spiritual, from the foundation…’

The notion that the spiritual can be found in the mundane is certainly felt throughout the Camden Arts Centre exhibition. Twisted and contorted constructions composed of waste materials are loaded with symbolism and memory – provoking feelings of unease and entrapment. Such sentiments refer back to Holley’s early years of enforced labour amongst the sooty, industrial landscape of Birmingham. Working in the House (2020), an installation of cotton gloves hanging in a metal wire frame – one black glove outnumbered by pristine white gloves – subtly points to social and racial divisions, as well as the domestic labour of women, while Foxhole (2024), in which wooden stairs balancing against the wall display a number of gas marks wrapped in barbed wire and metal netting, evokes foreboding and survival.

Holley’s work is artfully dystopic. The motifs of barbed wire translate into Holley’s large-scale paintings in the adjacent room, such as The Doorway to Us (2024), a wide work of gestural abstraction in seductive hues of black and grey. Just as in Holley’s wire assemblages, the silhouette of a face appears within the frenzied, chaotic composition – the outline of a forehead, nose and chin. The sea of faces on the canvas echoes the jagged, irregular shapes of the industrial found materials in his sculptures, creating a sense of visual coherence throughout the show.

The exhibition ends with a short film, I Snuck off the Slave Ship (2019), in which archival footage of Holley in the early ‘90s is woven together with contemporary footage of the artist gliding through the Okenfenokee Swamp in South Georgia. He’s wearing a wire netted mask across his face. Symbolically, it’s a poignant, if not enchanting, ending to a show that serves to confront and discomfort the viewer, articulating the harrowing biography of the artist but also pointing to the lasting damage of racial inequality in American history.

By Lydia Figes