Masters in Fine Arts Student Renee Holliday came back to school after working on her nursing degree and taking ceramic classes on the side just for fun.
“You know, I love art. I loved it when I was a child and then got away from it when I got older. And so just one class opened everything back up for me, so I completely switched gears, much to my husband’s dismay, and left my nursing career path and decided to pursue art,” Renee said.
Coming to Winthrop as an adult transfer student, pursuing and finishing her undergraduate degree in metals, Renee started off in ceramics and jewelry, then decided to shift gears a little bit.
Renee said, “I have, over the past five years, been working in jewelry and textiles. I love fiber. I actually- I love materials as a whole. I like to experiment and play with all the things. So I’ve made work out of hair rollers. I have made work out of hair ties. My work traditionally stems out of women’s roles, women’s expectations, things that women surround themselves with, also with motherhood. So I am a mother of two children. And so being a mom, that has directly affected being a student. They’re different identities and roles and so my work is- I can’t get away from that. It’s just so ingrained in who I am and what I do.”
Renee’s development as an artist has mainly come through experimentation. With her love for materials, she likes to manipulate and figure out new ideas.
“‘What could this be’, because a shirt isn’t just a shirt. What happens when I unstitch it, restitch it, fashion it into a brooch? Like that’s to me, exciting and accessible. … one of the things I realized is that my work really handles and tackles and deals with accessibility. As an issue of being accessible, but also not being accessible to a lot of people, which included me growing up, I come from a working
class background,” Renee said.
While both of her parents worked full time jobs, the world of art museums and painting and sculpture was not anything Renee had access to.
“We didn’t go to museums and we didn’t go see paintings. Now I could craft. I could go about my yard and pick up sticks because I grew up in the woods, like in the country, and I could go all my things and make things with what was at hand. And so my work that completely plays into
and has influenced how I am as an artist and a mother and how I raised my family. And so my materials these days are all reclaimed and found materials because I wanted to not only be accessible in a visual standpoint, from a financial standpoint, from a material standpoint, from all of those things, you know, there’s lots of ways to access art,” said Renee.
Renee’s graduate program is three years long. In her second semester, Renee faced serious health issues with one of her children, and had to completely step away from the program to be able to take care of her children.
Renee said, “It did a lot of things and put a lot of things in perspective as life events usually do. But it also changed the way in which I was working at that time. And in my explorations, I was working on a very, very large scale, kind of moving towards more sculpture, less jewelry and having to completely step away. … So it’s one of those things where taking a hardship, something that is truly life altering and allowing it to be a positive moment and a moment of positive change. So this is going to sound crazy, but I’m really grateful for that.”
As Renee considers herself a “nontraditional student,” she has worked hard to come back to school. After taking an 18 year hiatus from her first college experience, Renee came back to school as an adult. While it was difficult coming back to school with young children and knowing not only the demands of having children, but the demands of school, Renee saw this experience as a moment of pride.
“There was the fear of the reality that if I stepped away, I might not come back. Because life shows up and things get in the way. And it’s as a parent, there’s always that struggle of: do I put school before my children or do I put my children before school? How do these two intersectional life, beings, and events, and identities? How can they fit together instead of being one or the other? That’s actually, again, a huge part of my work. The title of my thesis exhibition is ‘Yes/And’ instead of ‘either or’ because life doesn’t exist in an ‘either or’ experience. Or a bubble. We get all of these things. We get the ‘Yes/And’ experience. And so my work really revolves around that. So, yeah, those are the challenges, lots of them. But that’s okay. I’m still here,” Renee said.
As a jeweler, Renee views her art as work that is “for the body to be worn.” As a woman growing up in the eighties and in the south, Renee says that she was taught to “really kind of demean [herself] for others.”
The artist raising two young daughters would like to break those cycles.
“My work, jewelry, how this relates is a way to really own my own body, accentuate my own body, celebrate my own body. And so I like to say and believe that not only do I have to make work for the body, I make work about the body. … I am a feminist at my core and, you know, not to get too much into it, but anyone who’s ever survived any type of sexual assault or trauma, usually one of the first questions that society tends to ask is, ‘What were you wearing?’” Renee said.
“The words, the language surrounding survivors and putting blame on survivors because of what they wear or what have you, is wrong. It’s outdated and should never, ever be spoken or even be in the conversation. And so my work really revolves around challenging those notions and allowing the wearer of my jewelry to objectify the clothing instead of the clothing objectifying the wearer, which is often how clothing is perceived. What we put on our bodies really says who we are as people, as individuals. Which is beautiful and it’s a celebration but some- times those around us can take that the other way and use what we wear as something that’s negative. And it shouldn’t be. It’s not. And I seek to challenge that,” said Renee.
Renee’s work will be displayed in the Elizabeth Dunlap Patrick Gallery in the 2020-2021 MFA Thesis Exhibition II taking place from April 19 to March 7.
