Richard Holliday & Renee Spierdijk

About

Richard Holliday:

Richard has been working stone by hand since his apprenticeship as a stonemason in 1980.
This included study at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, where he achieved his advanced City and Guilds with distinction. His training gave him the opportunity to learn the more sculptural side of this trade, and included working with wood. Richard was born in Cambridge in 1963, surrounded by the precise historical geometry which offered fertile ground for his love of the media of stone. His life has always centred around stone, and his experiences working on buildings such as Westminster Abbey, Kings College Chapel and Ely Cathedral alongside more modern projects was the crucible that began the formation of his own ambitions.

Although no more comfortable than with a scant of stone ready to be worked, Richard moved to Cornwall to pursue a more individual experimental and speculative way of sculpting.

richard-holliday.co.uk

Renee Spierdijk:

‘I am a Dutch painter who moved to England in 1977 to train at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths University of London. My work has been widely exhibited, including in the prestigious BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London and more recently at Kettles Yard in Cambridge and the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.

My work is a response to found photographs of young women and girls posed in formal settings with the individual often surrounded by political or religious artefacts.
I am interested in the process of domestication the women seem to be subjected to in which they can appear patient, content, outwardly accepting or quietly mutinous, as they wait and hope to become themselves.
While much of my earlier work dealt with issues of conditioning and isolation within the home, my most recent portraits deal with a sense of identity in the wider world in times of displacement and uncertainty.
Although the subjects depicted are largely from another time, the issues they are dealing with are universal and still relevant today.’

– Renee Spierdijk

reneespierdijk.com