Collective is delighted to present If you get the knees right the rest should follow, a new exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Holly McLean. In her installation, which features new work in film and collage, Holly uses the language of documentary film making to focus on alternative experiences of woman and motherhood.
If you get the knees right the rest should follow presents a slice-of-life of Alice Vandeleur-Boorer, an artist, market-gardener and surfer. Holly and her camera follow Alice across different spaces in her life and we witness their intimacy, humour and raw, open, frankness.
This is the latest in Holly's series of film portraits focussing on fertility, reproduction and motherhood: aligning discoveries and discrepancies between science, nature and challenges to norms of representation. The developing suite of films – beginning with Saturnrania in 2019 - draw on aspects of science-fiction, anthropological film making, home movie-making and artist’s film and video. Holly ‘disorders’ the language of documentary by foregrounding the plural identities of the women she works with: blending their lived realities with their speculative fictions.
Holly's collage practice uses a different visual and poetic form of storytelling to expand her ideas and uses a raw D.I.Y aesthetic to depict watery science-fiction galaxies that encapsulate birth, growth, miscarriage and child rearing in all their human and (and potential non-human) mess. The artist’s personal collection of analogue photography is combined with wide visual research into natural and cultural histories and bio-technical futures.
The juxtaposition of elements in this installation - a collage as icon and a film as portrait - emphasises Alice in her singularity but also seeks to explore different constructions of female identities.
Open Thurs-Sun, 05.12.20 — 31.01.21. Free, but please pre-book via Eventbrite
Holly McLean (born 1989, London ) lives and works in Glasgow. Recent exhibitions include; Visions in the Nunnery P1 (Bow Arts, London) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2019. Saturnrania (2019) was selected for and produced through the BBC/LUX Now & Next programme. Her work has screened at film festivals at centres in London, Kassel, Leeds, Glasgow, Albuquerque and Berlin.
Satellites Programme is Collective’s development programme for emergent artists and producers based in Scotland.