Artist: Amanda Holiday

Felix & Spear presents Amanda Holiday: Dreamery, an exhibition by the distinguished artist, filmmaker and poet Amanda Bintu Holiday (b 1964).

Dreamery brings together Amanda Holiday’s recent works on brown paper, drawn-on objects, and bunting fragments in a layered act of visual storytelling. Working with charcoal and oil stick, Holiday combines narrative and line through an embodied practice of mark-making that draws out the imaginary, the poetic, and the prophetic. The resulting drawings intentionally unsettle the viewer, inviting a deeper encounter with memory, feeling, and vision.

A recurring motif in Holiday’s work is the feminine arc or curve: the rotund stomach of the supine woman in Return II, the gown of the figure in The Story, the curve of the breast on which the young woman stands in The Cue, and the clusters of nipple-like mounds drawn directly onto the gallery wall. Through these forms, at once fecund and funerary, Holiday alternately uncovers and embeds black being as both presence and absence. For her, drawing becomes not only a visual method but also a means of channelling spirit and tracing the layered force of female consciousness.

Elsewhere, these unsettling charcoal drawings move through landscapes of interiority, dream, and selfhood. Dreamery depicts a mummified woman reclining in a state of rapture as she sheds her bandages. In Return II, the inner workings of the body pulse with undergrowth, while in Ode to the Nose, ghostly faces loom from the darkness around a large black nose suspended in space. Across these works, the body becomes a site of transformation, memory, and imaginative release.

Produced over the last two years, these works emerged from Holiday’s doctoral study into poetry, race, and art. In some instances, poems directly informed the drawings; in others, it was the conversation poetry opened up with the artwork that led to further visual exploration. This exchange between text and image deepens the exhibition’s engagement with voice, embodiment, and the imaginative possibilities of drawing.

Artist note:

The drawings are informed as much by my own feelings as an artist at a particular stage in my life as they are by the horror of ongoing wars and massacres. I became fascinated with historical artefacts such as face jugs and mummies, and I bring them to life in order to animate current social realities. Embodying drawn stories is a way of distilling our humanity, the part we play, and the ways in which we carry wounds.

About Amanda Holiday

Amanda Holiday was born in Sierra Leone in 1964 and moved to the north of England at the age of five. She studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and was actively involved in the UK Black arts movement, exhibiting in landmark Black art exhibitions during the 1980s, before transitioning into film. In 1989, she directed the Arts Council funded documentary Employing the Image, which examines the lives and work of five young Black British artists, including Sonia Boyce and Zarina Bhimji. This was followed by the one-minute film Manao Tupapau, which reanimates a Gauguin painting from the perspective of the model. Her BFI funded experimental drama Miss Queencake reimagines elements of Gauguin’s life as a decolonial anti-narrative. From 2001 to 2010, Holiday was based in Cape Town, where she worked in educational television. Her 1987 drawing Red Riding Hood was exhibited in Women in Revolt! which toured from Tate Britain in 2024 to the Whitworth, Manchester, in 2025. In the same year, she undertook a UKRI travel research fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Her artworks have been included in the group exhibitions Bloom Song and Gloam, and her drawing The Sense is currently on view in the Courtauld’s East Wing Biennial until 2027. Holiday was selected as one of two artists representing the UK at the Malta Biennale 26. She is currently completing a PhD in Poetry, Race and Art at the University of Brighton.