Holly Williams-Richards
b. in the shadow of leckhamton hill, cheltenham
like her mother, and her mother’s mother
Williams-Richards is an artist and curator working between Gloucestershire and London. Her work seeks to pair her interests in printmaking process, digital technologies, and photographic imagery with an on-going investigation into grief, language, ideas of home and/or belonging and systems of care. Her practice straddles across printmaking, sculpture, writing and sound.
Gaining her BA (hons) in Fine Art from the University of Gloucestershire in 2021, in the years following she went on to hold residencies at The British School in Rome, the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery and exhibit across the UK and Europe, before studying at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she is currently working towards her MFA in Fine Art under the Platche Scholarship.
Holly is the curator behind Pipeline Gallery, a contemporary artist-led space looking to better the cultural outputs of Gloucestershire and working to build better community for emerging artists within rural England. Notable projects for Pipeline include The Way We Left It and Pipeline Platform. Upcoming projects hope to include the opening of studios and a project / gallery space within the county and a development programme for creative youth in Gloucester.
I was once given an analogy in which death was compared to a horizon. The analogy went along with a hand gesture, following a hand held close to your face and then back as far as its arm can stretch.
As if it was bodily, of human. It not even of earth, of sea.
It was a conditional gift, beholden to duration and proximity. In the light allowing hours you may be able to regain your purchase but it will be lost again, an exchange between hemispheres. Always equidistant from, my mirror. Not an arm’s reach away, nor beneath my nose; that is a mocking. You are my fears compounded, a reflection; 5 years too late.
As if it was bodily, of human. It not even of earth, of sea.
It was a conditional gift, beholden to duration and proximity. In the light allowing hours you may be able to regain your purchase but it will be lost again, an exchange between hemispheres. Always equidistant from, my mirror. Not an arm’s reach away, nor beneath my nose; that is a mocking. You are my fears compounded, a reflection; 5 years too late.
17.05.24
I often doubt if anyone feels it as deeply, and questions it as often. I wonder whether it is a testament to our relationship that you hold so much space in my brain.
[I am speaking here of all the ones I’ve lost; loved and not so]
I hold it all so closely. They cling to my skin. Caught.
Leckhamton Hill lies to the south of Cheltenham, it has been a burial place, a sheep run, a quarry and a site for defence. it is now where I go in search of smallness. From its top I can trace my whole life, hers too, and hers, and his.
I think it’s ridiculous and so egotistical of me to assume that I experience this deeper than anyone else, I know my ability to let go is perhaps stunted as I bargain at every opportunity to regain some purchase, but grief plagues us all. It is this exactly that has led me to think about the language that surrounds it.
In the abundance of images on my phone I worry I’ve lost scarcity, I think I’m drowning in data, and reminders of you but I still feel to be forgetting. Pictorial languages and habits stick out, and choices in even the stupidest of selfies seem so coded, so stylised, so rarley did I take a photo of you candidly, perhaps an ode to undistracted joy you brought me.
To keep you alive and preserve your memory through conversation but not burden anyone with a loss too far gone. still, somehow no vocabulary seems fit. I cling to old slides and dictaphone notes.
Since studying printmaking in 2017 I have been obsessed with bitmaps and halftones, a computer translation of an image, a whole new way of seeing something. An image made for the sake of process, never valued as a whole.
I often question if the horizon I see is a phantom.
In these changing iterations of an image, as frequency bounces across the scales and balances out again, new partings, fields for enquiry and landscapes form. New ways of remembering you, recalling anything at all, emerge.
I’ve never been great at living away from my hometown, it feels like an extension of me. I enjoy the familiarity. The sense of calm in ageing, the regulars at the pub, my childhood best friends who have been the most consistent thing in my life since you.
It only got worse after your final breath. I don’t know how I’ll ever leave for longer than a few years, that's a lie; months.
I think I’ve gotta make it up to you somehow, I’ve got to stay and make it work.
How can I care for digital, technical, images the same way I care for their old wedding photos, or the one photo I have of you where I don’t see a devil re-incarnate, both collections of physical photographs lay untarnished, still warm-blooded, faded and worn from excessive stroking between finger and thumb.
how will grief change with abundance?
I don’t think I understand what I’m making, I don't think I want to really. I think I’m in search of permanence, all while knowing it doesn't exist, it cannot.
My grandfather was a metal polisher. I spent my childhood in his workshop, I found him that day, and I cleaned the blood up to save my mother.
I have his eyes. My mother’s laugh is his spit, if you ask anyone; I am hers.
my grandmother was a soft woman, eventually an amputee but no less of a force,a homebody. I left to go get some sleep, I shouldn’t have.
I have her wit. My mother’s heart is her spit, if you ask anyone; I am hers.
I am continually trying to draw parallels between myself and the native stone of my hometown.
A marker of time, or circumstances. A relic.
I am positioning myself equal, I am holding my origin with it.
I was born in its shadow, my mother too and her mother.
Now drenched in grief, I am erased of myself before it. Sodden
To have been berefted once is to always remain bereft. Without
I scream into the horizon; its many faces scream back. You are with me, of me, you are half me, all me.