In 2006, American poet Linda Gregg published the essay “The Art of Finding” in praise of finding poetry rather than crafting it.
“I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written,” she writes. Gregg defines finding not as happenstance, but as locating what she calls the “resonant sources” that already exist deep inside you. “Your resonant sources will be different from mine and will differ from those around you. They may be your long family life, your political rage, your love and sexuality, your fears and secrets, your ethnic identity — anything. The point is not what they are but that they are yours.”
I find myself thinking of Gregg’s resonant sources and their “provoking, instigating, germinating, irradiating” powers when considering work from folks like Emily Holt or Jodi Hays — multimedia artists whose materials come from scraps, off-cuts, byproducts and even their own disassembled art. These artists’ sources are such clearly poetic, generative forces, so resonant that you can practically hear them screaming, like the cicada-nuns in Holt’s latest solo show, Lossless Found at Julia Martin Gallery.
Playfulness and spontaneity have always been at the heart of Holt’s creations, whether she’s working with scrap wood or scrap paper, whether assembling booklets or sculptural creatures or dioramas. Lossless Found primarily features paper assemblages, though you’ll notice some coaxial cable and wood, among other materials. Some are like giant tapestries, others more like framed dioramas. Some very clearly look like a theatrical scene (A castle! A house!), and others are more abstract. All of them are delicate and whimsical.
In her artist statement, Holt describes one of her resonant sources for the Lossless Found showstopper, “Esplanade Promenade,” a floor-to-ceiling tapestry hanging from a battered white baluster. She writes about one of her first times traveling far from her home in Memphis, when she first visited New Orleans at the age of 13 and saw that it was “like no other place on Earth.” Thirty-six years later, in the summer of 2024, Holt chose to make the city one of her resonant sources, with daily walks up and down Esplanade Avenue, into the French Quarter and even a dip through City Park. “Esplanade Promenade” is two long pieces of paper with oscillating cutouts, but something about their curling edges and the way the pieces are barely in contact with each other feels exactly like transporting yourself to another place.
Holt’s mixture of handmade elements (eyeballed scalloped cutouts, natural paper, painted elements) and machine-made elements (perfect circles, zigzag sewing machine stitches) encourages the viewer to stand a nose away or less. One of my first moments of discovery in Lossless Found was noticing that the backs of some of the pieces are neon pink, so they glow slightly from behind. It’s a delight when an artist is able to re-create the little thrill — that “what could this be?” feeling — of discovery. Imagine your eye falling on something incredible on the ground, and realizing that people had been walking past it for days; the pink glow is like that feeling.
She uses color in abundance, but its absence is equally divine: The four color-blocked cicadas (“Cicada Sister Miriam,” “Cicada Sister June,” “Cicada Sister Flo” and “Cicada Sister Elvira”) feel like bold characters, and the color-drained cascading “Veil” feels most like an artifact or relic, perhaps the closest to being most recently stumbled upon. Strips of player-piano roll-paper appear in the flip-book layers of “Climb,” and those mechanically punched holes offer a little magic to the tiny hand-punched holes throughout all the pieces in the show. What if all of Lossless Found were fed into a player piano? What songs would it play?
Holt, a longtime teacher at the University School of Nashville who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from MTSU and a master’s in fine arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes about how her “viewer is cast as an actor,” and her folded, layered structures feel much like theatrical scenes in that way. “River House” stretches out before us; we are knee-deep in the middle of Holt’s river, and her folded triangles point us downstream. “Travers,” a tapestry that’s been opened (a red cord hangs to the side, like a pulley to change the set dressing) to reveal a tumbling scene of towers and hills, is nothing less than a myth whose story I would like to know.
Gregg’s resonant sources are like beans in a fairy tale: “They are present as essences. They operate invisibly as energy, equivalents, touchstones, amulets, buried seed, repositories, and catalysts.” They’re boundlessly regenerative, something that can be folded and refolded, cut and resewn, just like Holt’s artwork in full playfulness mode.
