Mummy Stories

Mummy Stories is a set of five distinct drawings that re-invigorate historical artefacts in unsettling imaginary narratives: a whirl of mummies, accusatory face jugs, an unearthed female body and miraculous levitation.

Here the past collides with the present in depictions of ghosts of selves and conferences of spirits that co-exist in time and picture frame. A sense of transmitted consciousness and conscience —aliveness infused with ancestral memory troubles the narratives, as ghost figures re-assemble the past and are the past re-assembling. In large-scale drawings on brown paper, historical figures and objects come into conversation with the ‘now’ within imaginary untellings cloaked by persistent
threats and warnings.

These charcoal and pastel drawings form part of a long series of research drawings that have emerged from Holiday’s doctoral study into race, poetry and art.

Artist note

The drawings are informed as much by my own feeling as an artist at a particular stage in my life, as by the horror of ongoing wars and massacres. I have become fascinated with face jugs and mummies and bring them to life to animate current social realities. Embodying drawn stories is a way of distilling humanity, the part we play and the ways in which we all bear wounds.