Lonnie Holley has a backstory straight out of a Mark Twain novel. Born in Alabama in 1950, he was accidentally fostered by a touring burlesque dancer, who later traded him to a liquor store owner for a bottle of whiskey. Around the age of ten he was incarcerated in the juvenile labour camp Mount Meigs, where he picked cotton. Holley calls it a slave camp. So when he ties together eight cheap metal forks with a padlock and titles his sculpture Chain Gang: Mt Meigs, this is a work dripping with autobiography.
The rasping, expansive sound of Holley’s freeform gospel singing and keyboard has featured on several albums since he started recording in 2010, but he’s been making sculpture for far longer. To help open the show at Camden Art Centre, he performed live in their garden with UK based American fiddler Sam Amidon. And in the show itself is Holley’s debut film, I Snuck Off The Slave Ship, an impressionistic 20 minute trip through his life and work. It’s soundtracked by a song from his 2018 LP MITH.
The film is ebullient, an outgoing stretch of choreography and visual partying, but in his sculpture Holley goes deeper. This is improvisational work, assemblages built from discarded items, some found during a pre-show residency in Suffolk, others simply picked up on London streets. He has a way of suspending things to release their power – so a cluster of gas masks and a paraffin lamp cling to an old wooden ladder, but the way up is barred by barbed wire (Foxhole). Wooden clothes pegs hold rifle targets to a funky wooden clothes drying rack (Hung Out). And I Knew They Were Mine has a spiky mess of thick bramble roots, perfectly held within a dilapidated window frame, the white paint flaking off.
These are all old, thoroughly used articles – the drying rack has seen decades of service before encountering this strange washing, these yellowing paper targets reeking of gun culture and racial violence. I see echoes of Mike Nelson, the UK’s virtuoso of discarded junk, who can evoke upsetting images of immigrants’ journeys with a bunch of dirty sleeping bags humped upon a raft of wooden pallets. Another link with Nelson is Holley’s habit of storytelling. Perhaps the largest piece here is The Nine Notes – a row of nine enormous wooden organ pipes. One of his tangled, monochrome spray paintings is fastened across the front. The pipes themselves are provocative – just imagine the low end from that – even before we learn this is a memorial to a 2015 church massacre in South Carolina.
Four new paintings occupy one room, all spray-painted with images of a human profile. They remind us how little colour interests Holley. The most we get is a sour green and yellow. For me they’re all upstaged by something strange hanging from the ceiling, a kind of dreamcatcher roughly thrown together from some farmer’s blue twine and Suffolk blackberry canes. It’s as if Holley might have found it, chucked out in a field. Or was it left behind after some rural horror ritual?
In fact it’s these smaller pieces of Holley’s that move me most. From The Streets Of Assisi is a compact limestone block crowned with twisted wire. The wire bubbles up into multiple portraits of faces. It looks like it was assembled fast, and with great skill. This is the throwaway, debonair knack of apparently effortless creation that has led people to bracket Holley’s name with Picasso. On this evidence, the acclaim is deserved.
Lonnie Holley, All Rendered Truth, installation view, Camden Art Centre, London, 2024.
