Ali Holloway MSDC

Ali Holloway use predominantly paper, silk and linen yarns to make her woven pieces. She incorporates stitch and macrame knotting techniques into her work and dyes the yarns she uses with mainly natural dyes. Dying methods are integral to her work. She space dyes yarns to introduce random placement of colour intended to disrupt the linear structure of the woven cloth. She often will submerse a whole cone of yarn in a dye bath so that when the yarn is woven the colour slowly fades out until there are only occasional traces of the colour left. This sense of progression and of the journey of the yarn is embedded deeply in her method of working.

In the making of a woven piece there is a balance between careful planning and the possibility of experimentation, this tension between the rigid linear arrangement of the warp threads on the loom and the potential to break free from these confines is what keeps Ali excited about the process.

Her woven pieces often start with a walk and an exploration of the layers of human experience that have been imprinted over time on a landscape. Weavings have been prompted by walks along the River Lea and the foreshore of the Thames at Tilbury. She walked round all the common land in Hackney and made recordings of these walks and translated the read out of the sound waves into pattern. Most recently she explored the shapes and the marks left on the land by the few remaining sites of ancient earthworks in London and made a series of woven and stitched pieces.

Alongside weaving Ali uses etching and monoprint to explore the themes of her woven work on paper and she is developing ways of introducing print into her woven textiles.

Education

• University of Essex, 1982 - 1985 - BA Art History and Theory
• Sir John Cass 1996 - 1997 - Art Foundation
• Central Saint Martins College of Art, 1997 - 2000 - BA Textile Design

Selected exhibitions

• 2024 V111 International Triennial of Textile Arts, Szombathely, Hungary
• 2024 London Craft Week, Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery
• 2023, Group Show, Wink Gallery
• 2022, London Art Fair
• 2021 Focus21, Chelsea Harbour Design centre
• 2021 Artefact, Chelsea Harbour Design Centre
• 2021 Commons - the rhythm of a walk, solo exhibition, Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery
• 2019 Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair, group show with Maker Project
• 2019 Flags, Unit 1 Gallery, London W10
• 2019 Collect, Saatchi Gallery with Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery
• 2016 Messing with Yarn, group show, Textile Arts Factory, Thessaloniki, Greece
• 2016 A Snatched Last Kiss, solo exhibition, Craft Central, London
• 2015 A Landscape of Beauty, commission and exhibition Forty Hall, Enfield
• 2014 By the banks of the River Lea, solo exhibition, Bow Mill Gallery, Three Mills, Bow, London

Awards/residencies/commissions

• 2015 - bursary from Jameson Works to make a series of weavings inspired by the story of my great great grandparents which culminated in an exhibition - A Snatched Last Kiss in 2016.
• 2015 - commission, Forty Hall
• 2017 - became a member of Contemporary Applied Arts
• 2019 - artist residency Studio Maelor, Wales
• 2019 - selected to participate in The Maker Project, a research project investigating the making process
• 2022 - artists residency Stiwdio Maelor, Wales
• 2024 - selected to showcase at London Craft Week
• 2000 - present - various private commissions