LUCY Holden
ABOUT ME
Brief Bio:
My name is Lucy Holden. In May 2016, I graduated from Beloit College with a double major in Creative Writing and Theatre (Performance) and a minor in Anthropology. I graduated with Honors in both the English and Theatre Departments along with Latin Honors of Summa Cum Laude. I was born in Chicago, IL and I am currently residing in Gliwice, Poland where I make my living as an English teacher. I have lived past the age of seven and therefore have a lifetime worth of stories to tell, which is why I am an artist. But one medium is not enough, as you can tell from the website. I do freelance writing, violin playing, visual art, and acting.
Artist Statement:
I want to challenge the way people think in order to inspire real change in the world. Our society is cemented in Western perspectives and mindsets that are destructive to the earth, humanity, and future generations. Despite the successes of environmental and civil rights movements in the last few decades, we are still entrenched in outdated values and goals, shackled by hate and prejudice, and unwilling to change. To break people from the cages they have been inhabiting, I will expose them to art that challenges conceptions of form while critiquing society through metaphor and uprooting our familiar structures and beliefs. I want to wrangle the rapid changes induced by technology into a means to make, spread, and advance art. The mediums I will utilize to further my goal are writing, theatre, visual art, and music.
To make my work, I take familiar structures and destroy them, recreating their forms into something new. I find standard values and beliefs and deconstruct them through the lens of story and character. Often, I will look for inspiration in art, nature, my own life, and mythology. I use satire and metaphor to critique and portray the world and society in alternate ways. I like combining mediums to create my work -- using music, writing, storytelling, visual art, and theatre depending on the piece. I employ immersive approaches to art, such as with a play I wrote entitled “The Land of Eire”, which was set outside and travelling with the audience moving and incorporated into the action. The goal of this approach is to draw the audience more fully into the art and further inspire them to think about what they’ve seen and experienced in relation to their own life and choices.
Currently I am creating a narrative newspaper told from the point of view of a family in crises and presented in print and online, so that anyone can read it. Through this altered use of a medium, I want to challenge the way the reader thinks about storytelling through news articles. The characters will address contemporary issues plaguing society today. They will also use the paper as an outlet to critically examine their own lives and each other. This builds off my desire to alter traditional forms while adapting to the growth of technology and advocating change that isn’t harmful to the earth and society. I will be applying numerous areas of my life to the project -- writing in various forms, research, music, visual art, cooking, and friends living overseas. Through this project I want to inspire social change while providing tools to enact it, introduce a new form of story that may be more accessible to a larger, modern audience, while also revamping an old form, reusing its typical structure in a new and thought-provoking way.