Holly Graham
Sustaining a weight
2023
Plywood with ebonised hardwood veneer
Dimensions variable
Graham’s research in Rome centres around the motif of the blackamoor in Baroque Italian furniture design, often carved from exotic woods, painted and gilded, and positioned in functional gestures of servitude. The work takes as its starting point an extract from Roman architect Vitruvius’ seminal text ‘De Architectura’, written in the 1st century BC. In the excerpt, the writer proposes an origin story for the architectural motif that sees female figures standing in for columns to uphold roofs of temples and monuments. Here, thinking across intersections of gender, race, and nationhood, Graham’s work considers ideas of punishment and silencing embedded into these gestures of burden-bearing and acts of petrification that in turn have informed further representations of the defeated, the oppressed, and the ‘other’.
