KRISTIN HOLLIS – BACKTRACK – 23 June-17 July 2026

Backtracking with Kristin Hollis
essay by Sally Blundell

I’ve been thinking about family, where I’ve been. A lot of women about my age get into writing. For me, I had to do something pictorial. It’s a coming out in a funny sort of way.
– interview with the artist, 15 April, 2026

The past isn’t a foreign country. It is a familiar topography made strange through memory and perspective; an unstable terrain through which the artist – or writer – scours the ground of the past for potent signs and recollections. At times, that topography fades into complete obscurity; at others it leers up in vivid hyper-reality. Mostly however, it is a frayed edge, a half-remembered path, a missing face, an inexplicable image, a forgotten question – a broken track comprising gaps, rewritings and erasings.

In traversing this personal history, the contemporary artist excavates not the tight borders of a foreign country but a fragmented record of experiences, learnings and imaginings based on the shaky foundations of memory and narrative – the twin structures, wrote US writer and academic Paul Eakin, of identity.

Two years after presenting Track, a series of works circling the before, during and after of the shock of a damaged aorta, Ōtautahi artist Kristin Hollis embarks on a performative navigation of ancestral and personal history. It is a restive story of invasion, diaspora and migration, using brush, pencil, charcoal and oil stick to collate an identity from memory, experience, place and, most of all, things: longboat, oil rig, vine, corset, lacrosse stick, monkey; the persistent tendril of a common perennial. These she laces together with a circuitous thread of long haul luggage. Wheeled suitcase, trunk, backpack – the portable repositories of a traveller’s expectations built from the abbreviated needs of the present.

Kristin (Stephenson) Hollis was born in Scotland then lived in Venezuela, The Netherlands and England before settling in New Zealand. She holds a BA (Honours) in Printmaking, Graphic Communication and Typography from the University of Reading, England and a BFA (Honours, First Class) and MFA (Distinction), both in Painting, from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Kristin Hollis is the winer of several awards including the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award in 2005. Her work is held in Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, Ara Institute of Canterbury and private collections in the United States, Britain and New Zealand.

BACKTRACK is comprised of 43 mixed media works on paper and canvas, images courtesy of Vicki Piper

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