Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's the unconscious collective
projected video
2 mins
2023

It's giving head
projected video
2 mins
2024

Swamp of Desire
Gelatine and pigment
150cmx150cm
2023

Holly O’Brien

Holly O’Brien is an Irish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Incorporating sculpture, costume & video, her work examines the relationship between the physical body, desire and the digital realm. O’Brien’s work navigates the feedback loop between the unconscious collective and technology. O’Brien received her B.A in Fine Art from the Limerick School of Art & Design and studied Costume Design for Stage and Screen at Inchicore, Dublin. Her MFA programme at the Glasgow School of Art was funded by the Leverhulme Scholarship Trust and was a recent recipient of the Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council. She has also been shortlisted for New Contemporaries 2024.

Visuals from digital platforms bleed out into the optical arena and public psyche, creating a visual language, an unspoken narration. The internet presents a medium through which we navigate and relate our own experiential framework of values and desires. O’Brien’s work is highly inspired by mythology and folklore and how these stories weave narrative and symbolism to cultures' shared experience. As our contemporary culture becomes inextricably interconnected with technology her work attempts to reflect back possible glimpses from our new subconscious pool, the online abyss. A swamp of desire, addiction, pleasure and escapism, from where creatures emerge, a hybrid of origins. O’Briens gelatine work viscerally explores the materiality of being in flux. The work captures fluid states, body without narrative, a melted monolith, a conglomerate of archetypes, condensed essence, the nature of consciousness before action, a portal as destination.