Output details

Untitled Glass Installation

This commissioned site-specific piece developed from Holyhead’s approach to painting, yet required working alongside industry professionals – glass engineers, to be specific – to develop techniques suitable for the translation, directly onto glass, of a highly specific vocabulary of colour, shape and line that forms the foundation of his research.

Glass, as a material, offered the opportunity to consider the nature of Holyhead’s approach to painting by locating his vocabulary outside of his familiar context of production, in terms of scale and process. The challenge of this particular project was to renegotiate his attitudes to painting as an object (the work became structural, embedded in the building); and how the specific qualities of painting could remain convincing when its production was located in digital printing technologies.

This commission was a result of previous exposure in solo exhibitions and the East End Academy. Holyhead’s underpinning research develops out of abstraction, examining the relationship between notions of reduction, the painterly, and procedures of transforming ‘pure forms’ into slightly stretched or angled ones. His context is European abstraction, in particular the kinds of discourse that have been put in place by artists such as Raoul de Keyser.

The finished commission, and its relationship to the industrial processes of the work, provides important clues about Holyhead’s work is made and suggests how his work might be positioned in respect to broader considerations around abstraction. The commission is on permanent display in the New British Embassy and the UK Permanent Representation to the European Union, Brussels, Belgium. The research has been exhibited at Revealed: Government Art Collection, Ulster Museum, Belfast, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Commission profiled in: Art, Power, Diplomacy: The Untold Story of the Government Art Collection by Penny Johnson, Julia Toffolo, Richard Dorment and Andrew Renton, Scala Publishers, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-1857596915. Extracts included in the submitted portfilo.