“Body of Light” (Overview), Installation of fabric and LED light., 15’W x 11″H x 7’D, 2023
Holly Wong
Artist Statement
My work reclaims the female body and bears witness to the spirit. A major throughline in my work is the wound or scar and the power of taking back the night by healing the scar. Creating works of beauty in brokenness is my highest act of resistance.
I make fiber and drawing based installations, assemblages and works on paper to memorialize my mother whom I lost to alcoholism and domestic violence when I was 15. These works range in size from intimate pieces to larger immersive works. I use a variety of fabric and flexible drawing surfaces as my medium, applying the skills passed down to me from my mother who was a talented seamstress.
The sexual violence my mother and I each experienced in our lives led to a self-loathing of my body, cultivating the anorexia and mental illness I struggled with as a young woman. Now, I stitch and draw as a journey towards wholeness, both for myself and for my mother’s memory.
I started to work with fiber installation in 2017. I became attracted to working with light, reflective, transparent fabrics because it reminds me of the permeable separation between the living and the dead. In my current series “quilt suspensions,” I use a flat felled seam technique with transparent fabric. I combine these ephemeral materials with LED strip lighting and diffusion film as a proxy for my mother’s spirit. The layers of pieced fabric are suspended over this light-spirit as a shroud or mourning cloth. Inspired by Chinese funeral customs, the quilt layers become burial blankets that are offered by the children of the deceased and layered upon their loved ones.
Past Group Exhibitions: Structures of Feeling, 2022 Fractal Nature, 2021 Forever is composed of Nows, 2020 Active directions of the mind, 2019