KAS Review | MELANIE HOULT: HOLDING 2024

Kannitha Lim

Holding by Melanie Hoult is an installation of ceramics and fabric, shown at Glimpse Art Space, Northcote, in May, 2024. A still life or life stilled by time. Empty clay vessels crowded, some broken, on the floor against the wall, cornered. For Melanie Holding  represents the emotional, psychological and physical aspects of containing. For myself the work brings the viewer into the realm of non passive spectators. Observers on the precipice of action triggered by the thoughtful, mediative act of viewing.

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Melanie Hoult

Holding 2024 – (ongoing)

Shown at Glimpse Art Space in May 2024

Words by Melanie Hoult

In our life we hold so much. Holding pain, expectations, insecurities, grief. Grief for our loved ones, climate grief, grief about the state of the world, grief over genocide.

We hold anger and disappointment. Over our treatment of First Nations people. For the so many deaths of women at the hands of their partners. For apathy.

We guard and contain. Our feelings, our children, our bodies. We support, we organise, protect and grow.

We hold our anxieties, our relationships, our families. We are trapped, obscured, held back. Buried.

We crack, leak, weep. Ferment and fester. We hold on for dear life.

We collapse, we break, we let go, we fall apart.

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Melanie Hoult is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm, with a love for installation and ceramics. She is often drawn to working with natural materials and is passionate about social justice, the environment and our place in it.

Melanie is a member of the recently formed SLOWPOKE - Slow Power Collective and sells functional ceramics as Night Forest Studio.

She has spent the last 20-ish years holding on to (and refusing to let go of) her desire to make art while life had other ideas.

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