Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Holly Marsden

Through drawing, etching, object making and short collaborative films, I want to tell stories of journeying past magical thresholds, past sites and objects, to find out forgotten ‘secrets’. My etchings are pretend ‘maps’. The same images are drawn over and over, marked with small units of measurement, plotted with extended lines that connect constellations of pictures like satellites, animals, houses, viaducts, pylons, shooting stars and strange landscapes. They become window-like portals or ‘TVs’, murmuring a weather forecast for another time.
I want to ask what it feels like to be told something made from cardboard and tinfoil is a machine with a specific function or that a nonsensical map will softly tell you an important message you have forgotten. I often work from pictures I have seen in dreams. Through drawing, this becomes a way of mapping an unfinished ‘sleep thought’; burrowing through something and looking at what tumbles back, to play in the gaps between things. In this way I express my interest in the pretend: the pretend map, machine or journey and child-like ideas of cause and effect: ”if I do this, then this will follow”. I am interested in shared imagining or the act of trying to relate to someone else’s imagination. Like in theatre, when people come together to watch something, dreaming collectively.
