File Note 151: Lonnie Holley

Unless otherwise stated, all citations are either from lyrics by Lonnie Holley or fragments of his conversations with the author.

Driving through fields of crops and pig-farms in rural Suffolk, Lonnie Holley narrated the landscape for me, reading it through the lens of his singular experience. Fallow fields cloaked in diaphanous white membranes stretched across the land, undulating in the wind, ‘like the ocean’ he said. We had just left a barn where Holley had produced a new body of work for his show at Camden Art Centre. He said the fields reminded him of Mount Meigs—the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children where he was tormented and abused for several years of his youth 1 and forced to work the land. He explained that without modern machinery it was literally blood, sweat and tears that brought in the harvest. Perhaps the white sheets reminded him of the cotton they had to pick.

The legacies of slavery, and the ongoing oppression and exploitation of Black people, are explicitly memorialised in many of Holley’s works. Repossessed by the Rules (2018) is a simple but powerful piece in which padlocks pierce an old-fashioned wooden ruler, posing questions about justice—to whom it is afforded and the innocent who suffer unfairly in its name. Other works directly revisit his time at the industrial ‘school’. 2 A small but poignant found-object work, Chain Gang: Mt. Meigs (2019), binds a handful of dinner forks together with a padlock. Lifting the Rail (2005) recognises the human, racially enslaved labour that built the ‘civilised’ world. In The Harvesters (2020) a wooden rake entraps a model ship inside a fishing net, a recurring motif that invokes the horrors of the Middle Passage. Maybe this was in his mind when he saw the ocean in the fields, an expanse of collective trauma.

There is a tenderness in Holley’s works that acknowledges the pain and struggle of domestic labour as well. Hung Out (2021) is an old clothes-drying rack with rifle targets hanging from the bars. Holley spoke of the many innocent Black people ‘hung out to dry’ and the mothers who mourned them. Working in the House (2020) is a wall-mounted assemblage of white gloves suspended in a wooden frame—perhaps a eulogy to his grandmother’s seemingly indefatigable labour (domestic and otherwise). He speaks of her hands, how she cooked dinner and made beds, dug graves and worked in the landfill. Holley has shown there is life beyond the landfill, a supposed end point, and this has come to be the central rubric of his work, making a career from dumpster-diving in the industrial and urban wasteland to source the primary materials for his art, submitting them to acts of sublime recuperation.

Holley’s narrative sculptures operate as parables that fire the imagination and bring about moments of recognition or remembrance of truths—distillations of meaning that open out to multiple interpretations, ranging from the domestic and personal to history works—stories that circulate at the level of social consciousness. While in the UK, Holley’s gaze turned to British history, how it has accreted with the patina of found objects and is inscribed across the landscape. ‘London Bridge is falling down’ he said when I asked how this context was impacting the work. An untitled sculpture made in Suffolk combines the root and thorny branches of a blackberry bush found nearby with other materials—chicken wire, rope, cloth and barbed wire. Talking about it he said, ‘I wandered to the blackberry vine. The rabbit ran into the blackberry vine like the slave would go to hide.’ This is one of many traumatic memories. When trying to escape from the infamous Mount Meigs, he ran for hours upon hours and fell into a deep hole, where he finally surrendered to sleep. When he woke, he found he was in a grave and dragged himself out by a tree root—a source of salvation and an important signifier in Black Southern Art. The struggle for growth begins with the root—in darkness, in the dirt, in what’s hidden. ‘As a plant takes hold in a crevice—the roots are gonna be first.’

Holley refers to that sunken grave as the ‘Dream Hole’: a place of fear. To this day, he avoids sleeping more than necessary, saying he’s ‘better awake’. Haunted by memory, his dreams provide no respite, returning him to the trauma of the past. In response, he drags that space of immanent possibility, of unseen realms, dream and imagination, the underside of the visible, into the quotidian waking world, heaving up what is beneath, infusing reality with a contemplative quality, a waking reverie: ‘I’m catching the dream.’

Speaking of extreme historical events that cycle through history as ‘apocalyptic upheavals’, philosopher Michael Marder relates them to the ‘domain of the elemental realm—the unpredictability of the movement of the earth, a shadowy underside of existence emerging into the daylight of the present’9. Growing up in Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement, Holley has the visceral, embodied knowledge of upheaval in its truest sense—as synonymous with revolution. Works from his series Without Skin (2023–ongoing) have a formal simplicity, constructed from two interlocking components—unupholstered chairs and industrial-scale fire hoses. They read as dynamic, semi-abstract gestures in colour and form that hold, yet seem to collapse into space like John Chamberlain’s crushed-car assemblages. The fire, or ‘attack’ hose, has a double meaning: a conduit for life-giving or life-saving water, as well as a weapon of brutality and racial violence used to suppress the social uprisings of the civil rights movement in the US, in some cases literally flaying the victims. This mutilation poses another powerful question: how would life be different ‘if I didn’t have Black skin’?

A drop of water falling from the sky
Grandmother praising the light, in the sky
Grandfather, the trunk, the truth
The first wonder of the world
Blackness illuminated
We are always returning
The essence
The roots
We are the wonder 11

Holley’s cosmology is spelt out in recurring symbols—the tree root, the crucifix, chains, circles, ellipses, orbits—a syncretic spirituality rooted in the earth, steeped in his upbringing with Christianity as the cultural baseline. But if there are allusions to religion, the ideals are channelled as virtues rather than applied as dogma—a kind of cosmic humanity that lives in right-relation to the great wheel of creation, a direct knowledge of self and its reciprocity with the entire universe. ‘I am a part of the wonder.’ A man in the universe, the universe in a man, soothsayer, teller of stories and truths, however hard to hear, from the nitty gritty to the outlands of the imagination, a maker of images, of animated visions … Images in words and matter. Blood on white stone. Sunk in a grave and heaved out by the root. Holley’s is a practice that imparts wisdom, optimism, knowledge and hope. ‘Hear me well’, he said. I hope I did.