Currently, Holly is curating an archival exhibition for Historic Environment Scotland called ‘Our Changing Landscape’. This will open in Spring 2023 at Stirling Castle.
Holly Keasey is a Water Artist, currently based on the edge of lake Mälaren in Sweden or emerging in Scottish waterways.
Her practice is expansive, crossing many mediums and formats including community engagement, curation, workshopping, research, story-telling, installations and publishing. Yet this expanse is bound by a niche interest in water as a physical substance, a cultural symbol, a theoretical understanding and a vastness that is integral and intertwined with everything.
Similar to water, Holly’s practice is in constant movement, pooling between desires to expand the forms of Public Art, re-searching how Art can be a critical and generative aspect of society, and creating support systems that will allow artists to practice in these ways.
Key to this movement is a belief in performativity to bring imagined alternatives into being by holding a space in time just beyond the everyday lives we already live. It is with this in mind, that Holly considers her practice as a mode of durational embodied performative research into the role of the Artist as a participant in ecology. A mode that actively brings such a role into being.
Key to this movement is a belief in performativity to bring imagined alternatives into being by holding a space in time just beyond the everyday lives we already live. It is with this in mind, that Holly considers her practice as a mode of durational embodied performative research into the role of the Artist as a participant in ecology. A mode that actively brings such a role into being.
Holly grew up on an agricultural research facility in North Yorkshire, England before moving to Scotland in 2007, and then Sweden in 2017. These places, along with the North Sea and constant rain of the UK, have been significant influences on her practice.
![Dundee, Scotland]()
![Långserud, Sweden]()
![Stockholm, Sweden]()
![Leeds University Farm, England]()
To date this has led her practice to take on varying roles within many long term projects including being the Lead Artist for Trout in Transition with The Clyde River Foundation, a Director of the artist-led space Generator Projects, invited lecturer for sustainability focused programmes at CEMUS and Co-curator of the largest independent Public Arts programme in Scandinavia in 2018-22, Artistic Undressings of The Royal Seaport.
Working with a practice of site-responsiveness, her process includes extensive research into a site’s current, future and historic ecology.
Current research is focused on questions of art as environmental communication as an independent partner in a series of Working Labs alongside representatives of Färgfabriken, Moderna Museum, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, The University of Borås and Uppsala Art Museum; Storytelling to Save the Planet alongside researchers Sofie Joosse, Martin Westin and Fanny Möckel, and global senior research manager at Greenpeace International, Soenke Lorenzen; and into the expansions of Public Art formats that can bring into being more ecologically sensitive ways of living.
Holly is regularly invited to take part in other artists’ projects. This has included producing a pedagogical template for The Arbroath Template by Bob and Roberta Smith; to be part of the (LIVE)publishing team for Studio Jamming at Cooper Gallery; editor for the Edits-Whilst-You-Wait project hosted by Claire Walsh; and various projects curated by Jonathan Baxter.
Holly’s chosen medium is any medium that lends itself to the given objectives, context and site for a work. Her use of mediums focuses on the generative qualities it may hold inrelation to an underlying activist intention. Having worked as a fabricator, producer, artist assistant, gallery technician, workshop facilitator and hostess… Holly understands how mediums function and how these functions can be diverted to form new meanings.
about this website
The design of this website is curated by graphic designer Benedetta Crippa. Thank you to C. Mazé & Coline Sunier,