Water Still 25
Penobscot Bay Light
Holly Willis uses text and image to wonder how we might reimagine our relationship to the world, not as autonomous beings moving through isolated landscapes, but as embodied forces intimately enmeshed with the matter around us. These images capture sunlight and water from Penobscot Bay in Maine, shot with a camera that moves in tandem with these elemental forces.
Holly Willis
Holly Willis is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines the materiality of the image within a broader context of new materialist philosophy and the histories of experimental film, video, and photography with the goal to design encounters with media that spark an embodied sense of curiosity and wonder. Using a variety of analog, digital, and computational image-making tools, Willis explores the ways in which we might reimagine our relationship to the world and its varied spaces and landscapes, not as independent beings moving through separate realms, but as transcorporeal forces enmeshed in dense relationships with the matter all around us. She asks if we can imagine the world not as some inert backdrop to human activity but as a dynamic array that we engage with in ongoing relations, how might we care for our world differently? Her body of work overall attempts to capture this sense of active matter, of sensation, and dynamism, and strives for what Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, calls the “arts of noticing.”
