About the Artist

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Sarah May Hollis si a British / Chinese dancer and painter. The artist trained at the prestigious Laban School of Contemporary Dance, embarking on a distinguished professional career that spanned the UK, France, New York and Israel, before pursuing architectural training at the renowned Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. This elite, multidisciplinary foundation directly shapes a studio practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, choreography, and visual art.

 

Through this unique lens, the artist's work interrogates the inherent limitations of the flat canvas, exploring the impossibility of fully capturing the world's complexity on a two-dimensional plane. Technical architectural drawings and mathematical notation systems are treated not as rigid constraints, but as fluid, choreographic scores. Influenced by the structures of musical notation and the physics of movement, the artist views rhythm as the primary expression of life—an ongoing state of transition where even stillness holds latent motion.

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The artist’s methodology bridges the digital and the tactile, synthesizing hand-drawn digital notations with traditional oil painting. Through an intricate process of iterative layering, structures continuously emerge, fracture, and dissolve. This intentional formal unrest gives the canvases a perpetual, open-ended energy, allowing the paintings to refuse a final resolution. Ultimately, the work seeks the precise moment where structue and liberation meet, uncovering a mystical complexity where the unknown comes into being.

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'Dancing and painting are one for me, a unity of mind body and spirit.'

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