Holly Whitnell (b. 2004, Kent) is a final-year student at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
Her practice concerns itself with the weight of the word 'experience', and more specifically, what constitutes the act of experiencing. 

Informed by how we feel, recall, and reimagine, she uses painting as her primary meditation and draws on memory, emotion, and visual sensation. With these elements, she then abstracts her reimagined landscapes and turns to mixed medial approaches to materialise this idea of ambiguity and a warped reality. As a form of reflection, her work questions why certain moments stay with us—why they resonate beyond the everyday—and how this internal and external way of perceiving an experience can be translated into material form.

Right now, her art exists in a kind of flux: between seeing and not seeing and between feeling, and feelings of  absence. It’s a way of engaging in a memory of time, place, and space that feels true to her. There’s a resemblance there—something that makes recognition possible for others too and conforms to a contemporary aesthetic dialogue. A kind of analogue to objective experience.

But within this, ambiguity ultimately prevails as it questions this act of representation and introduces a maybe? — a dimension of seeing that becomes entirely subjective. Colour here plays a significant role, and at times, its absence does too. Everything is considered, even in its uncertainty.