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And this is among the things that Holley picked up on as he made his work, typically linking it to his own biography. The site’s biggest claim to fame is that the first demonstrations of the feasibility of radar as an air defence system were done there, a cornerstone of the allies’ success in the Second World War. In that landscape, he gathered materials for sculptures, and performed a series of musical works for the film. The Ness was a military testing site and is now a nature reserve, where shingle and wetlands surround atmospheric military ruins.

Lonnie Holley performing on Orford Ness in southern England, March 2022 in a still from The Edge of What, 2022Īll of this new body of work is inspired by the Artangel commission, for which Holley was based on Orford Ness, the peninsula at the Eastern extreme of southern England. Alongside that is a film, The Edge of What, commissioned by Artangel, streamed on the organisation’s website from this month and shown as part of an evening event at the new London arts venue Stone Nest on 14 May alongside a performance by Holley. At Edel Assanti is his first UK show of sculptures and paintings for almost 20 years, since he exhibited at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2004. Now, he is widely celebrated for both the sculptures he initially made from found objects in his yard in Birmingham, Alabama, and, more recently, his performance practice, based on improvised voice-and-piano compositions-impressionistic, autobiographical and deeply moving.īoth aspects of Holley’s practice feature in a two-part contribution to London Gallery Weekend.

The trauma that follows is relentless, including physical abuse, horrific racism and exploitation and jail time, before his life was saved by art.

Early in the text, he writes about a woman who took him away from his mother as an infant before, when he was four, “the lady sold me to another lady for a pint of whiskey”. In the 1990s, Lonnie Holley wrote an autobiographical sketch, a stream-of-consciousness memoir of extreme poverty and hardship. Check out The Art Newspaper's guide to London Gallery Weekend 2022 for recommendations on the best exhibitions to see during the three-day event, top trends and commentary