Today, our Senior Spotlight is focused on Holly Scott!
Briefly describe your artistic practice.
I mostly work in printmaking and comics right now, but my practice feels so scattered that there’s work I’ve done in painting, writing, and video that still feel crucial to what I do. I think the key to it all is that I make pretty selfish work, where it’s about working through my own issues and experiences, and the fact that it results in something other people can interact with is often kind of incidental. I’m trying to talk about being mixed race, about dealing with severe mental illness, about having a complicated relationship with gender, and about inheriting cultural and family trauma, and while I want these larger conversations to be accessible to an audience, especially those that come from similar places, more than anything they’re conversations with myself.
What are you currently working on?
Right now my big thing is this huge sci-fi comic-illustration-writing-worldbuilding project. I’m trying to wrangle a whole bunch of big ideas about capitalism and family and memory and trauma and empathy and the super out-of-touch idea that humans can somehow ‘escape’ into space. It’s kind of a huge undertaking, and the more I work on it, the more I become aware of how it’s probably a 5, 10 year kind of project, but even knowing that it still feels like the right thing for me to be doing right now.
How has your artistic practice changed since you started working entirely from home?
I’ve admittedly been a little paralyzed working from home. I’m lucky that my current work happens to be digital, so that makes things easier, but the main problem has been focus. How I’ve ended up trying to work around that is by jumping between projects, and letting myself work on whatever feels good for as long as it feels right, then stepping away when it doesn’t.
