A month in the life of Drew Connor Holland
Text by Laura Couttie, 2025
This strange, intimate series of works offers an insight into the state of mind of the artist at a very particular moment in time. 16 June to 10 July 2025: a period in which our news cycle and social media feeds were dominated by information as varied as the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel’s nuclear strikes on Iran, Trump’s birthday parade, ICE raids in America, the arson attack on a Melbourne synagogue, a pedophile childcare worker charged with multiple sex offences, ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine amidst continued drone and missile attacks, the trial and conviction of Erin Patterson (‘the mushroom killer’), and record heatwaves in Europe. At the same time, in Sydney, Australia, Drew Connor Holland was dealing with petty housemate dramas and a dodgy employer. From the political to the personal, sometimes everything happens at once. In processing these simultaneous realities, Holland wondered: ‘How do I conceptualise that very schizophrenic conversation between a macrocosm and microcosm?’ The response: this series of works, made in a condensed and intense period, that attempts to articulate the experience of a month in his life.
Throughout Holland’s practice, we see artworks that are imbued with layers of personal and collective histories. Holland is drawn to images and references that are situated in a particular time and place, knowing that someday they will become irrelevant, or no one will understand their original context. His experiences, memories and emotions always factor into the images and materials he selects. Much of that imagery is sourced online, drawn from the endless archive of material that already exists in the world. There is a sense of consciously recycling, or upcycling, the detritus of our image-driven society.
These works are no different. The images that appear here are extracted from the image archive (photo reel) of the artist’s phone, predominantly screenshots captured from Instagram in this three-and-a-half-week period. At this time, Holland was spending a lot of time on his phone – ‘every morning, going to work on the train, on my lunch break, going home’ – (doom)scrolling on his Instagram account (and his secret ‘finsta’) and being subjected to an ‘absolute deluge of insane content over and over and over again’. He started capturing images in a ritualistic daze: scroll, screenshot, repeat. If an image caught his attention for more than a second, it got a screenshot. The result was a photo reel containing an absurd amalgam of the grotesque, humorous, poetic, violent, smutty, beautiful and disturbing: the full spectrum of human life as shared and consumed on the internet.
As Holland grew increasingly disillusioned with his day job (which he quit before the month was out), he settled into a daily routine: finish work; get on the train; send a bunch of screenshots from his phone to Officeworks to print; collect the prints from Officeworks; walk the short distance from Officeworks to his studio; spend several hours making these artworks using the printed images. Holland tried not to focus too much on concept and outcome, rather concentrating on the composition of each individual piece and embracing the immediacy of the process.
The unique analogue image transfer process Holland is known for – images are translated from the digital into the physical using low-fi stationary materials then subjected to various processes of manipulation, including staining, varnishing, and overpainting – is more visible here than in previous works. He enjoys the incidental collaboration with the Officeworks printers because they remove an element of control from the making process. He explains that when the printer reads the image file sent from his phone, it often makes mistakes, and the images are printed with random manipulations – ‘some images will be cropped in half; some will be three images in one’. The abstraction of the images dislocates them from their original context. This suits Holland nicely.
Faces appear in many of the works, often blurred, distorted, fragmented. Staring back at the viewer, they mirror us to ourselves. In the artist’s own words, the works are ‘anxious, weird, sad’ – reflecting the angst many of us are feeling at the conditions of the world at that moment. Amidst a never-ending bad news cycle and the barrage of content and information we are confronted with daily, we try to live our lives as best we can. Dark humour can provide some form of relief from the realities we face, and some of Holland’s works certainly provide a dose of that remedy.
In these works, layers of images are frenetically built up like advertisements pasted one on top of another on a wall, spilling over the edges and leaving traces of what came before. Holland is an artist who draws in pen rather than pencil – both literally and metaphorically. He doesn’t plan, and he doesn’t start things cautiously. His modus operandi is: ‘If it’s not working, glue something else down. Build up the layer. Start again.’
There is a sense of urgency to the works, a messiness and energy. They feel alive, like moving images captured for a moment of time – which, in a sense, is exactly what they are.
about the artist
Drew Connor Holland is a New South Wales based artist who works on Gadigal, Gayemagal and Awabakal land. Holland graduated from Sydney’s National Art School in 2018 with a Master of Fine Art (Painting) and has been exhibiting since 2013 with solo exhibitions at Nasha, NSW (2022); Jan Murphy Gallery (2019, 2023); ALASKA projects, NSW (2017, 2018); and Galerie Pompom, NSW (2020). Regionally and internationally, his work has been included in Disintegration: Metadrawing and Expanded Drawing (Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, 2022), Wrestlemania (Rockhampton Museum of Art, 2023), Shimmer (Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, 2022), and the Auckland Art Fair (2023).
Holland’s work has been recognised through key awards including the 2022 Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship Shark Island residency, and as a finalist in major national exhibitions including the Blake Prize (2024), Mosman Art Prize (2024, 2025), Gippsland Print Award (2015), and Hatched: National Graduate Show (2017). His works are held in public collections including Maitland Regional Art Gallery and Townsville City Galleries.
Image: Drew Connor Holland, An unsettling, 2025, synthetic polymer, marble dust, toner, paper, archival varnish on board, 30.5 x 23.0 cm
