A Lost Song Detail by Holly Grace
The ANU School of Art & Design are pleased to announce Holly Grace as the recipient of the 2026 Christine and Stephen Procter Fellowship.
Selected from a field of national applicants, Grace’s proposal is to create artwork in glass that envisions the role of humanity within the environment both as its protector and destroyer. It will include periods of making in Australia and Denmark, informed by research and engagement with Indigenous knowledge holders both here and in the far north of Sweden.
Holly is an internationally recognised artist whose work uses glass as a three-dimensional canvas for imagery, video and sound projection. Walking across remote sections of the Australian landscape is central to her practice, during which she records lifeforms that exist within its topography, both human and non-human. It is her goal to “find my identity and culture through place and environment, discovering where I belong within a fragile landscape and transcend my role from interloper to kinship.”
Educated at Monash University, she has also worked in the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Denmark, and been awarded residencies in Norway and Scotland. Her work can be found in key national art collections, and her public artworks can be found across the country. Based in Canberra, she works out of her studio at ANCA and the Canberra Glassworks.
Holly is also currently participating in the Sharing Stories Art Exchange, a fieldwork project run by the Environment Studio at the ANU School of Art and Design. Through Sharing Stories, she has expanded her practice to acknowledge Indigenous knowledge and Country, as well as a growing understanding of humanity’s past and ongoing relationship with both the local and global environment. She wants to explore the planetary boundaries framework that highlights rising risks from human pressure on critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth.
During her residency in the Glass Workshop, she intends to work with ANU students and staff, using glassblowing and digital fabrication to create a series of glass tools based on machinery traditionally used in farming and other industries that throughout history have played a role in directly manipulating and altering the environment. She will then travel to Denmark, where she will take up a second residency at the Royal Danish Academy’s Glass and Ceramics School on Bornholm, an island with World Craft Region status.
Finally, she will travel to Tärnaby, Sweden, to participate in a mentorship with Monica Edmondson, a Sámi glass artist whose Laplander heritage has a close connection to the landscape and to the traditions and histories of the region that spans sections of Norway. Similar to Australia’s First Nations peoples, Sámi communities have learned to survive in harsh environments and live in balance with the landscape.
Holly will give a public presentation of her work in the School of Art and Design Seminar Series in Semester Two.