Artist Loie Hollowell describes the timing of her latest exhibition as magical, coinciding with the Artemis II moon mission. She named her series Overview Effect after the astronaut term for seeing Earth from space, evoking awe and interconnectedness. Hollowell notes that many might want to leave Earth given its problems.
The Overview Effect Exhibition
Currently at London’s Pace Gallery, Overview Effect features large-scale canvases with twin concave and convex sculpted circles. If folded vertically, the halves align perfectly. The works radiate outward in vibrant, soothing rings of color, continuing earlier themes of pregnancy and birth through abstraction. Her Split Orb paintings and Dilation Stage series responded to her son’s difficult hospital birth, while Overview Effect reflects her daughter’s easier, empowering home birth.
From External to Internal Perspective
Hollowell explains that the first birth’s work was more diagrammatic, like a self-portrait from an external viewpoint. The second was more internal and present. A sci-fi enthusiast, she looked to space to capture the out-of-body experience during labor. During contractions, she felt she could see her daughter’s head emerging from above, merging with her own perspective. This inspired the twin circles in her compositions, abstract without context.
Downstairs, her pastel works explore bodily themes: abortion, conception, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. Hollowell, born in 1983 in Woodland, California, was raised by a painter father and a seamstress-cartoonist mother who had four children easily. Hollowell found motherhood far harder, noting the difficulty despite her mother’s casual attitude.
Influences and Inspirations
Beyond O’Keeffe and American modernists, Hollowell admires Louise Bourgeois and Luchita Hurtado’s birth paintings. She also drew inspiration from Instagram home birth photos and Ina May Gaskin’s childbirth manual, noting the symmetrical compositions of legs and vagina. Hollowell acknowledges the misogynistic dismissal of artists like O’Keeffe as obsessed with vaginas, but now speaks openly about her influences, including an abortion that inspired early works. With support from female curators, she highlights these origins.
Balancing Abstraction and Figuration
Hollowell struggles with blending abstraction and figuration, especially since abstraction sells better in the art market. Her pastel drawings like Happy Vagina and Boob Wheel more obviously represent vulvas and breasts. She also makes body casts and collaborates with her children on paintings. She believes the barrier between physical and abstract can be dismantled.
Reflecting on hormones, Hollowell says she was super horny during early works, thinking about sex constantly, but now in perimenopause, she feels more in control. She notes that her favorite artists blossomed in their 50s and 60s. She doubts she could have made this work 20 years ago as a mother, but times are changing.
Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect is at Pace Gallery, London, until 23 May.
