The Alchemy of Arkansas' Kathleen Holder
This article first appeared in the printed version of "Women in the Arts" magazine, published in the National Museum of Women in the Arts' Holiday 1999 issue. Click here for a link of the original.
Kathleen Holder had been working as an artist for more than a decade when she began questioning the integrity of her artistic expression. Her representational works were technically skillful and visually compelling, yet they didn't embody the spiritual and autobiographical elements she felt should be integral.
Remembering her first encounter with a painting by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko as "one of the most moving experiences of my life," Holder set out to create works possessing the same energy and emotion. "There's a lot of abstraction that is kind of contrived design work, but the Rothko wasn't that," she says. "It was much more compelling and powerful. I always wondered if someday I would have the courage to do something that minimal, but I didn't know where to begin."
Holder's artworks began to evolve into figurative abstraction, and over the next 15 years she followed what she calls "a reductivist path, moving toward a leaner and much more subtle minimalism." She has sought to portray the invisible and the intangible—temperature, atmosphere, light, sensation—often looking to books, music, and her own life experiences for stimuli. "Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis is an amazing book, and I'll periodically go to it and crack it open to a page to see what that page has to offer," she says. "Brian Eno's album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, inspired a series I call Private Incantation. And the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt wrote a mass that is breathtaking, and I once played it over and over again for several months and let the music transform into a work." Holder meditates, repeats mantras while painting, tacks meaningful words and phrases to her wall—anything to help her capture the ineffable.
In the late 1980s, then a professor at the University of Arkansas where she still teaches, Holder started seeking out alternative surfaces for her renderings, hoping to find something more substantial than paper for her application of pastels. One day, on a drive back to Little Rock from Memphis, she came across an abandoned site where hundreds of graphite tablets were stacked. Among various industrial applications, graphite is used as a moderator and liner in nuclear reactors. With this in mind, Holder had the desire to reclaim a medium that she felt served an ominous and malevolent function. She loaded the stones into her car, and they became the surfaces for her next body of work. Two of her works on graphite from the series titled The Alchemist Diary will be on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts: Invocation-Moon and Invocation-Signifier. Holder derived the name of the series from her belief that the artist is an alchemist who transforms base matter into gold (art).
