Lisa Holden is a British-born artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her earlier visual work explores notions of the self as a series of estranged identities-guises adopted and appropriated, and dependent upon context. Holden has been integrating performance art, painting and drawing, photography and video, and digital manipulation of these combinations of forms in a manner that is clearly advancing the parameters of art photography and creating a new art methodology/language in the process.
She combines digital imagery with hand-painted layers to create 'parallel realities', referring to the exploration of displacement, adoption and the reinvention of identity as a necessity for survival. Holden's large-scale, 'digitally flawed' painting-photographs interpret and react to our super-fast-paced, technologically driven society. The result is the artist's depiction of a psychological spiral into more personal fracturing of identity, multiple transformations, and a more isolated self and society. New works clearly bear the stamp of Holden's interest in Victorian painting and literature, which often illustrated richly colored fantasies and hallucinations.
A work is created first on the basis of footage shot by the artist (using either a digital still camera or a digital video camera) and is often based on and documents a separate performance art event. The artist frequently takes her own image as the basis of the image. Integrating the digital artifacts randomly generated by the repeated layering process noted below into the final composition, her portrait becomes obscured, iterating the artist's ongoing interest in notions of identity, alternate personas and constructed reality.
