belfast shadows
“Themes of class, colonialism and conflict run throughout all of my work but had never referenced the ‘Troubles’ until In 2013 Warp Films and director Yann Demange made ’71 – a Northern Ireland Troubles - set film.”
“They identified Blackburn, where my studio is located, as the town that most resembles early ’70s Belfast. The notion that Blackburn would become part of the set for this fictional narrative triggered an unexpected series of art works on my part. As the students I taught on Blackburn’s art foundation course signed up to become extras in ’71’s riot scenes, I revisited my own memories of Belfast, all located under my bed, in my dad’s army scrapbooks.”
As a 19-year old soldier, Holman’s father had patrolled the Belfast streets – his three tours of duty lasting from 1971 –73. A member of the provisional IRA shot and wounded him in the stomach on the Falls Road on September 15, 1972 . His photographs and letters from Belfast began to melt into the Blackburn streets that Holman walked through every day.
“When I saw the boys that I taught throwing stones and shooting at soldiers I wanted to protect them. I saw my 19-year-old father running through Blackburn streets with a gun, and I wanted to rescue him. I began to time-travel, collaging the photos of then and now, of Blackburn and Belfast, blurring the boundaries of the architecture, leaping back 40 years, and back again.”
As he began to retrace his own past, laying out his own history alongside his father’s, he began entwining fact with fiction in order to better understand the political by interrogating the personal.
17 Piece Service, 2023
The Kids Round Here, Plaster, 2016
Acid House Internment Incident, 2016
Belfast Shadows, 2016
My Catholic great grand parents came to Blackburn from Ireland to work in the cotton mills and as a consequence, my own personal history and notions of identity are unavoidably connected with the Troubles.
What interested me when I started making work, were the similarities and cultural signifiers beyond the architectural similarities that ’71 proposed : the top ten, clothes, magazines, the chip shop, the pub and the banality of the day to day in terms of working class people caught up in, and participating in, extraordinary events, until those events become normalised. There is a great quote I got from a soldier who, when talking about the rioting, said “Everything stopped for Top of the Pops.” He suggested that in both Blackburn and in Belfast, people stayed in and watched TV and waited to see who was at number one, regardless of what was happening outside. If it was a good Top of The Pops, there might even be a quiet night in Belfast as a consequence.
This suggested a cultural commonality that I became fascinated with, as it contradicts both notions of “the other” and of the nostalgia machine that suggests we were all experiencing the same things in the same way. On the day my dad was shot, ‘All the young dudes’ by Mott the Hoople was number one.
Throughout this series of work, I try to place small memories like this next to each other to reveal something beyond their singular value, and beyond the significance placed on them by any specific community. Sometimes I’m exploring the idea of a unifying memorial, as there is a danger in singular identification and of accepted cultural nostalgia replacing individual memory, and of that nostalgia becoming the way we collectively remember.
17 Piece Service, 2023
The Kids Round Here, 2016
Bank Top, 2016
Contagious acts | The Whitaker
24 Hands | The second Act
Exhibited in…
‘Contagious Acts’ began as ‘24 hands’ which expanded to become Contagious Acts at The Whitaker
‘Public Order Act : Where 12 or more persons who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for a common purpose; and the conduct of them (taken together) is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety, each of the persons using unlawful violence for the common purpose is guilty of riot.’
Expressing the current and historic expression of governance and state violence across industry, working class people and protests. Holman's 'Destriers' series located governance and state violence in both public and domestic spaces, exploring working class protest, crowd theory and police control strategies, as part of an English heritage that first appears in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Ultimately concerned with the everyday banality of violence and these works are both bleak in their relentless overview of state oppression, while at the same time, uplifting in the hopeful resistance of ordinary people, during extraordinary circumstances.
