Artist

Judy Holding is an established multidisciplinary artist with a career spanning over 40 years. Exuding immense energy, Holding’s visual vocabulary of symbolic forms conveys her lifelong connection to the landscape of regional Victoria and far north Northern Territory, especially to the escarpment Country of the Kakadu region, Murrumburr Country.

Innermost to the visual language of Holding’s practice is her brazen use of vibrant colour to emphasise the underlying life force of the landscape. As an accomplished watercolourist, Holding has worked to deconstruct the notion of landscape painting across her career to present the Australian environment in its unresolved and ambiguous brilliance. This unique painterly lens is one shaped and informed by her lifelong connection with Murrumburr Senior Traditional Owner Jessie Alderson. Known to each other as Yabok, older sister, and Yagerr, younger sister, Holding and Alderson’s enduring friendship is woven into the fabric of Holding’s understanding and depictions of far north Australia. The complexity of her experiences is revealed in the harmonious layering of her paintings, brought about by an innate gift for colour and design, developed and nurtured over many years. 

With a seemingly boundless amount of creativity, Holding’s practice also explores the sculptural form, enabling the artist to reinterpret her love of organic nature into contemporary materials. These objects are assemblages of industrial materials including cement, bronze, steel and enamel, and delicate components such as found objects, gold leaf and birds – hand-knitted, carved in wood, cast in bronze and moulded in fibreglass.

Holding has exhibited extensively in Australia and abroad, and has been collected by many major institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; the Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria; the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria; the Mildura Arts Centre, Victoria; and the collections of Deakin, LaTrobe and Victoria University, Victoria; and the Parliament House Collection, Canberra. Most recently, in 2023 two of Holding's artist's books 'My Symbols' and 'My Landscape' were acquired by Library & Archives NT in the Northern Territory.

© The Artist & Alcaston Gallery, 2023

For an extended CV, please contact Alcaston Gallery at art@alcastongallery.com.au