Jessica Holdengarde

Jessica Holdengarde is a photographer and collage artist from Cape Town. Her interest in memory and nostalgia finds expression through the reworking of old photographs and cultural artefacts, found in junk stores throughout the city, into new images that intermingle the past and the present.

She has graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT), and continues to lecture at the Orms Cape Town School of Photography (CTSP). She completed a residency at the Berlin Art Institute in 2017.

“These are a selection of works that have been created over the last two years, all using the act of collage as a representation of the subconscious mind.

Art for me has forever been a means of expression of the untranslatable ‘thing’ - that sense of emotion, projection or feeling that evolves within a process of making. Since my graduation from The Michaelis School of Fine Art in May 2017, I have predominately been working in mixed-media collage which informs my focus of the ineffable, fragmented psyche. Cutting, ripping and sewing in order to curate a world of juxtaposed shapes, forms and scenes. I navigate a re-imagined world with emotive use of colour and cut outs.

My personal memories have been moulded, unearthed, buried and resurfaced continuously with my work. As I cut, unearth and randomly place objects, colours and shapes next to one another I enter a space that is meditative in its practice. My work becomes a record of a dialogue between myself and my psyche. The act of making becomes the liminal state of searching and healing - to find answers of the self. “