Amanda Holiday was born in Sierra Leone on 28 March 1964 and moved to England aged five, where she was brought up in Wigan. A graduate from Wimbledon School of Art (1987), Holiday is best known for her large-scale, figurative, mixed-media drawings, exemplified by her series 'The Hum of History', a cyclical story about aspirations in the 1980s, realised in charcoal and chalk. An active member within the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, Holiday has participated in major exhibitions championing the work of diaspora artists.
Painter, poet and filmmaker, Amanda Holiday was born in Sierra Leone on 28 March 1964. At the age of five, she moved to England and grew up in Wigan in the northwest. She attended Jacob Kramer College in Leeds (named for the Russian émigré artist, now Leeds Arts University), where she completed the foundation course alongside fellow students, director, Clio Barnard and artist, Damien Hirst. She subsequently continued her fine art training at Wimbledon School of Art, graduating in 1987. Holiday is best known for her large-scale, figurative, mixed-media drawings, exemplified by her series The Hum of History, a cyclical story about aspirations in the 1980s, realised in charcoal and chalk. The work comprised a captivating collection of figurative pastel drawings that offered social commentary by weaving together themes of migration, both from an outsider and insider perspective, and created intriguing and multi-layered visual narratives. Holiday’s images created circular tales of yearning, belonging, and not belonging, where universal stories intersected with personal narratives, shifting from local to global perspectives. Her works can be, alternately, romantic, prosaic, and unsettling, as the ordinary and mundane assume surreal and even ominous proportions. As noted in the exhibition catalogue, ‘Holiday’s emphasis is on the visceral, the prescient and the sensory. The hum becomes a scream, the mouth a gaping hole, while a comb menaces the horizon’. The Hum of History was included in Black Art: Plotting the Course, curated by Eddie Chambers in collaboration with Bluecoat, Oldham Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1988 and was also the focus of Holiday’s solo exhibition at The cueB Gallery, London in 2011. According to Chambers, diaspora artists such as Amanda Holiday, Sonia Boyce, Simone Alexander and Mowbray Odonkor, ‘created a range of compelling works that located images and experiences of Black women, like themselves, their friends, their mothers, their sisters, at the core of their practice’ (Chambers 2013, p. 144).
An active member within the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, Holiday took part in major exhibitions championing the work of diaspora artists, including: Creation for Liberation at Brixton Village (1985, 1987); The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art, an exhibition of work selected by Marlene Smith and Keith Piper held at Cornerhouse, Manchester (1987); Black Perspectives, which took place at the South London Gallery and was organised by the 'Sojourner Truth Association' in collaboration with Southwark Arts and Greater London Arts to provide a 'window' to the talent of Black artists in Southwark. In 1989, she participated in the Arts Council Black Arts Video Project and created a short video titled Employing the Image, which showcased the works of a number of contemporary radical Black visual artists, such as Sonia Boyce, Simone Alexander, Zarina Bhimji, Keith Piper, and Allan deSouza. In 1990, she made three further films for an Arts Council/Channel 4 collaboration: Umbrage, Manu Tupapau and Miss Queencake.
Holiday is also a poet. Her Art Poems, published in 2018 as part of the series New Generation African Poets by Akashic Books, were inspired by artworks at different points in her life. These included Donald Rodney’s In the House of My Father, a close-up photographic image of Rodney’s hand in which sits a minute sculpture of a house (1996–7, Tate Collection), the Wind Sculpture series by Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Paula Rego’s Flight to Egypt (1998). In 2020, Holiday founded the UK's first crowdfunded poetry publisher, Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, which focuses on the work of Black and women poets. In the same year, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. As an illustrator, she designed the cover for the chapbook Square by Sienna Liu (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2020). In 2020 Holiday commenced an AHRC Techne funded PhD in Poetry Race and Art at the University of Brighton. Her artwork is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Amanda Holiday]
Publications related to [Amanda Holiday] in the Ben Uri Library