Camden Art Centre presents All Rendered Truth, a major institutional solo show by Lonnie Holley, the American artist and musician creating raw beauty from refuse

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1960, Holley has been producing work spanning across painting, sculpture, music and moving image for more than four decades. His practice is informed by his extraordinary life, particularly the poverty and hardships he faced during childhood, as well as his immersion into the Civil Rights Movement. Clear themes throughout his career include the legacies of slavery, ancestral ties, and the ongoing systemic oppression and exploitation of Black people — making him a key figure in the Black Art tradition and an acclaimed contemporary artist.

The exhibition centres new works made during a production residency in Suffolk earlier this year, alongside previously unseen sculptures made at The Mahler and LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy in 2023.

As I make my way into the central gallery space, I’m overcome by the installation of eighteen small sculptural assemblages, which have been made by Holley over the past 23 years. There’s a spontaneous energy that naturally evokes from each piece. These freeform compositions have been fashioned with found objects, with his most recent works having UK-salvaged materials such as Victorian glass apothecary bottles and flattened copper pipe retrieved from an intersection in West London. As a frequent motif throughout the show, the pipe is a metaphor for the vital energy, water or air that sustains life.

Holley learned to create with found materials from a young age, making art ‘in the creeks and ditches’ around his home in Alabama, where he’d dig for worms and find buried objects. He’d also go on to honour his grandmother who would frequent the city dump and gather wires for materials like copper, aluminium and brass. Holley’s practice is all about redeeming dejected objects and giving them dignity, as well as a new lifecycle. 

Similarly to reclaiming unsought objects, Holley comments on overlooked communities like Flint, Michigan with No Milk and Bad Water in the Hood (2018), whose majority Black population endured a public health emergency of contaminated water for years with mismanagement by government officials. 

Another impressionable piece includes The Nine Notes (2024), featuring repurposed components of an antique pipe organ with enamel and spray paint, commemorating the nine congregation members who were murdered by a white supremacist in the Charleston, South Carolina Church Massacre in 2015. The abstract painting on the surface mimics other layered portraiture we’ve seen throughout the show but this time in monochromatic grey tones. The soft outlines of various faces collide into one another, creating a spectral display of an absent community. 

An additional new sculpture, Without Skin (2024), includes a pile of un-upholstered chairs wrapped in decommissioned industrial ‘attack hoses.’ The piece pays weighty remembrance to fire hoses used to suppress social uprisings during the Civil Rights Movements, as well as racially motivated arson assaults.

The final space contains the first film directed by Holley, entitled I Snuck Off the Slave Ship. Produced in 2019, it is a 20-minute sci-fi story of the artist’s background and work, presenting archive footage from the early 90s showing a younger Holley recovering objects from a mound of rubble in an urban wasteland and carving in sandstone. The film opens with him gliding through the Okefenokee Swamp, South Georgia whilst sporting one of his signature wire sculptures across his face. We also see institutions that have played a pivotal role in Holley’s development, including Mount Meigs: Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. The film’s title takes its name from a track via the artist’s 2018 LP MITH, which coincidingly is used as a soundtrack for the film.

When watching I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, I feel almost as if summoned into a trance. Holley’s coarse, bluesy vocals make the room feel still. The transgressions between reality and imagination mimic liberty and subjugation, encompassing the Black American experience. It’s a powerful tribute to Black history and suffering — but importantly, resistance.

It’s impossible not to feel connected to Holley’s transformative world. He’s able to assign everyday objects these powerful narrative stories. Weaving together traumatic histories and hope for universal truth. Rather than precious materials, he uses what’s immediately at hand. From rusted scrap metal, chicken wire, and washers to plastic plants, wood, and circuit boards. There’s improvised intricacy in the way Holley moulds his creations. With a profound love for the natural world, he continues to give life to the lost, using art as a process of memory and renewal.