For full-time artist Hollie McKenzie, painting provides fertile ground for exploring the experiences and challenges of life as a woman today. “I’m a humanist foremost but have struggled to be heard and valued because I am a woman,” she says. In a socio-political climate where systemic abuse of women is finally coming to the foreground of public discourse, Hollie seeks to expose the fraught relationships of her past by visualising their emotional and physical impacts in paint.
Universally confronting, Hollie’s practice teeters on a knife’s edge between fantastical impossibility and gut-wrenching reality
With her young daughter Bea Bea acting as muse and model, Hollie takes photographs, which are then worked through on Photoshop, to produce a final reference photo to work from. Paint-ing with oil on aluminium panels, the final image that emerges usually depicts a young girl wielding a dangerous weapon or in other confronting set ups.
With unhealthy relationships as the subtext, the artist’s concern for the lost innocence of the emerging generation and the increasingly uncertain future they will inherit is apparent.