Biography
Holli McEntegart, born 1980, Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, NZ
Lives and works in Tamaki Makaurau
Holli McEntegart (b NZ. 1980) is a Pākehā (Eire/Ireland, Alba/Scotland, England), interdisciplinary artist moving fluidly between social practice, video, performance, photography and text- based work. She received a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography in 2006 (Unitec, NZ), a one-year Masters of Fine Arts scholarship at Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh, USA (2011), and a Masters of Arts (First Class Honors) from Auckland University of Technology (2013). In 2014 she was an Artist in Residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (USA). She has trained and worked as a full spectrum doula in NYC, LA and now Aotearoa, approaching this mahi through the lens of social practice. After almost a decade living in the United States, Holli returned to Aotearoa NZ in 2020 and was awarded the 2021 Letting Space Public Arts Commission for, Inhabit - an ongoing participatory art project engaging traditions and patterns of care for birthing people, as these survive and morph through colonisation and migration.
Holli is a co-researcher on The Tīpuna Project, a creative community-based collaboration between Māori and Pākehā researchers, artists and activists in Aotearoa to experiment with the decolonial possibilities of communing with our Indigenous and settler ancestors. Now based in Tamaki Makaurau, her work has been performed and exhibited throughout the USA and Aotearoa.
Artist Statment
Artist Statment
My studio practice is inextricably connected with my everyday life. It exists in response to, persistently, in protest. It shape-shifts and waits around corners. With every project, my work becomes a document of my lived experience, mapping a search for belonging and interconnectedness. As a Pākehā New Zealander, I'm guided by both the Celtic traditions of my colonial ancestors and the decolonizing lens through which I try to live.
Becoming a mother has pushed me to the very edges of my selfhood. As a maker, it is there that I find a new materiality that longs to be reimagined, repurposed and rehoused. I seek public engagement through community participation, weaving individual stories into collective narratives. I look to those community relationships as material; small gestures like sharing a cup of tea become intimate acts of mark making.
Most recently I’ve been interested in the residue of labour found in textiles and their connection to the body, the land, and memory. Stains and holes map a journey as they’re handed down or discarded, I unravel and reconstruct, not just the yarn, but the story, history and traditions embedded in the warp and weft.