Epilogue

Lianne Lang | Jessica Holmes

The exhibition draws together the delicate threads of memory, legacy, love and loss. Statuary, memorial images, funerary urns, flowers are carefully rendered in Jessica Holmes’ work, drawing on her historic research into cemetery botany and the changing traditions surrounding death from Victorian to contemporary practices. She finds many of her motifs in this series of work within Kensal Green Cemetery. Liane Lang’s work depicts statues of women, many who lost their lives prematurely. The legacies that these statues are intended to preserve are frequently fragmented or lost entirely. Lang returns the images to sculptural material, from marble and scagliola to delicate materials like bark and bread. Both artists’ work tells of the emotional depth of our desire to remember and be remembered and the difficulties this encounters in a society that has sanitised and removed death from daily life, leaving few rituals and places for grief and remembrance.

Liane Lang is a visual artist, living and working in London. Her multi media practice takes a special interest in statuary and monuments and her projects have included the plaster cast collection at the Royal Academy of Arts, Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest and the Atelier de Moulage of the Musée du Louvre. Lang was educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, took a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, and an MFA at the Royal Academy Schools, London graduating in 2006. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally, including the Musée de Beaux Arts Calais, James Simon Gallery at Berlin State Museums, Kunsthalle Tübingen and Lian Zhou Festival, as well as PS1 New York, Kunstwerke, Berlin and Kunstverein Heidelberg. She won the Photofusion Award, the Tooth Travel Award and the Selina Cheneviere Prize.

Jessica Holmes’ painting practice is inspired by archival materials and historical sites, using elements of these to focus on artefacts and places at the point where the past and present meet, questioning memory and interpretation. Holmes studied at Wimbledon School of Art (1998-2002) and the Royal Academy Schools (2003-2006) where she received the Landseer award in her final year. She has exhibited extensively in the UK, and internationally, including a six month solo exhibition at the Royal Armouries; National museum of arms and armour, Hote Gallery Los Angeles, and Forage Space, Narrowsburg, New York. She was selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition 2020.