Holly Anderson uses painting to investigate sensory experiences with bright sunlight. Works from her series ‘Pool studies’ present ongoing experimentations with the grid and negative space to reproduce sensual optical experiences in Australian landscape.
The pool presents a game of three surfaces for painting; its tiled floor, shifting water body and reflective surface must be collapsed into one autonomous plane. Small squares in a grid flatten these layers, while unpainted areas let sunlight’s brilliance emerge from negative space. In these works, splashes conceal the grid beneath their shine, a ray of light refracts a rainbow, and water’s surface cracks like glass in a burst of sunlight. Anderson’s Pool studies observe the optical anomalies produced by bright sunlight as spatial anomalies in painting. With this method, Anderson proposes a relationship between our senses and the world that is stranger than at first glance.