Holly Kilner has made her own body the subject of her first solo show and the results don’t flinch. Excavation of a Traitorous Body previews at Abingdon Studios this Thursday.
Across paintings, biomorphic forms and recurring motifs, Blackpool-based disabled artist Holly Kilner charts what she describes as an ongoing negotiation between the body, the medical world and the self.
The work displayed in her first solo exhibition, which previews this Thursday at Abingdon Studios, moves through investigation, diagnosis, surgery, loss and recovery – not as a single dramatic event but as something lived and relived.
Loss is a motif running through the work, but so is resilience. Recovery isn’t presented as a return to how things were, but as an adaptive process where pain, memory and healing sit side by side. Fittingly, the exhibition’s interpretation text is written in the first person, keeping the story in Kilner’s own hands rather than handing it over to an outside voice.
Kilner paints organ-like forms directly onto repurposed NHS envelopes, taking correspondence that’s usually a source of dread and turning it into something closer to self-portraiture. Elsewhere, she works awareness ribbon colours tied to her own health conditions into the paintings – small, recurring symbols of reflection and acceptance rather than illustration. It’s a practice she describes as sitting somewhere between vulnerability and empowerment, using her own experience to make work that’s as much about resilience as it is about illness.
It’s a significant moment for Kilner, a Blackpool School of Arts graduate and a resident artist of Abingdon Studios who also works as Learning and Engagement Officer at Grundy Art Gallery.
She’s shown as part of Grundy Open and The Manchester Contemporary in recent years, but this is her first solo commission, developed through Abingdon Studios’ ongoing partnership with Grundy Art Gallery and support from Arts Council England.
