We are pleased to share a new collection of paintings by artist and archivist Jessica Holmes. Built around treasured objects inherited from family members and encountered throughout her childhood, the series unfolds as an intimate exploration of memory, imagination, and symbolism.
By Sophie Heatley | 11 Jun 2026
“This is my most personal series to date,” Holmes announced during my visit to her London studio. Her latest body of work, currently titled Night on Bald Mountain, draws on a constellation of references: childhood memories, particularly the objects she was forbidden from touching; a longstanding fascination with archives and historical artefacts; and a broader curiosity about how we make sense of the past.
From 1950s Nagasaki pepper pots to nineteenth-century French clocks, Holmes paints an emporium-like display of collected objects passed down through generations of her family. “They’re all things I’ve grown up with,” she says. “And what I’ve noticed with all the things I’ve painted is that they’re all things I wasn’t allowed to hold or play with as a child. They were precious.”
Her father, who shared a deep love of ceramics, grew up in the Staffordshire Potteries, while her mother was an avid traveller who spent considerable time in East Asia, most notably Japan. Together, these influences shaped the array of objects that now populate Holmes’s paintings. “I think not being able to touch them as a child gave me a sort of intensity of looking,” Holmes explains. “These are all items I made up stories and narratives in my head about. I’d look at them, and I’d see stories developing in the background and amongst the flowers.”
Threaded throughout the series is an interest in the historical impulse to collect, categorise and display strange or as-yet-unclassifiable objects. Holmes’s paintings offer a subtle nod to Cabinets of Curiosities and Wunderkammern, or Wonder Rooms: encyclopaedic collections that predated the rigid distinctions between art, nature and artefact that define modern systems of knowledge. Like the cabinets that inspire them, these works resist fixed categories, holding mood, material culture and the natural world in delicate suspension.
Floral motifs, ornamental fragments and historical references drift across the linen in shifting configurations, where observation gives way to invention and new meanings emerge from familiar forms. Now that these once forbidden objects have come into her possession, Holmes continues to uncover new narratives within them. “I still see things I’ve never noticed before. The more I look, the more I realise there is still so much unfamiliar coming through.”
Holmes notes that many of the ceramic motifs that appear in the paintings are borrowed from mass-produced domestic objects sourced from around the world. “I really love this mixing of time and place,” she says. “It puts me in mind of Dutch Vanitas painting, which has always been a very important point of reference for me.”
There is something of the profuse abundance found in the still lifes of Dutch Vanitas painters such as Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davidsz. de Heem, where cut flowers, treasured heirlooms and exotic imports appear held in a state of perpetual flowering. In Holmes’s compositions, too, everything seems to bloom at once. Yet she sidesteps the sombre gravitas traditionally associated with the Baroque genre. Instead, the works unfold with a kind of theatrical intensity. Their titles, in particular, conjure the stage, recalling not only the music Holmes listened to in her youth, but also the heightened drama of these allegorical arrangements and how they perform for, and upon, the viewer.
Furthermore, where the Vanitas tradition often insists upon life’s transience, Holmes’s paintings pulse with something more regenerative. Flowers spill and unfurl through vases and pots, their contours becoming so entangled that distinctions between vessel and bloom begin to dissolve.
A sense of time and inevitability does permeate Holmes’s paintings. Her muted ochres, tobacco browns and bruised reds, together with her deft texturing, evoke the softened patina of age, signalling decay. And yet there remains a striking sense of hopefulness: an insistence on accumulation rather than loss, on lives lived, on stories passed between people and places, and on the cyclical rhythms of nature. Perhaps this sensibility can, once again, be traced back to Holmes’s childhood fascination with these precious, almost taboo objects, and the narratives she imagined they concealed.
For me, what ultimately distinguishes her work from the memento mori tradition to which these art historical precedents belong is its aliveness. These paintings are less meditations on mortality than affirmations of continuity: a kind of memento vivere. They remind us not simply that life is fleeting, but that it is something to be continually discovered. Above all, they invite us to keep looking.
