Lydia Lorelie McCullough Holmes (b, 1986, Tandragee, Northern Ireland) is a multi-disciplinary artist who exploits the full range of possibilities offered by sculpture, drawing and painting and in a variety of media. Holmes explores the tension between social and political subjects and fuses these with aesthetic and formal concerns. Inspired by the ‘Futurist landscape’ imagined by members of the Futurist movement (1909-1944) she makes oblique references to Filippo Tommasso Marinetti (1909-1944) and the movement’s connections to Fascism. Her work parodies the irrational ideals of the Futurist’s visual language and the Fascist statements in their manifestos. But this artist also takes an unapologetically contemporary perspective that teases delightedly with today’s scientific and technological advancements.

She invites the viewer into her strange world, populated by hybrid animals and living machines. This is a world that exists somewhere between the one we know and one that is just out of our reach. It manages to be simultaneously unfamiliar yet compellingly similar to our own. Holmes combines and confronts found or manufactured objects or imagery, forcing them into polyvalent dialogue in the surrounding space.

Holmes graduated from the University of Ulster in 2010 with a first class honors degree in Fine and Applied Art. Recent exhibition include: a solo exhibition ‘Bio-technia’, Queen Street Studios, Belfast 2011; M-Machine, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 2011; Salon Vert, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh 2011; Elephants at the Royal Standard, Liverpool 2011; Ghosts in the Machine, The Others, London 2011; Not Just For The Birds, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 2011; Arrivals: C-13 Response Closing Project, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast 2010; The Royal Ulster Academy (Invited graduate), Ulster Museum, 2010.