NN Contemporary Art presents a special screening and Q&A of Hermione: Kingdom of the Sick by artist Andy Holden at Northampton Filmhouse. Between Autumn 2021 and Spring 2022, Holden was artist in residence at NN Contemporary Art, where he spent time researching and developing the initial storyboard and script for this major new work, which premiered at The Museum of Everything in 2023. Following the screening, Holden will be in discussion with Writer & Critic Tim Smith-Laing.

Free, but donations welcome at the event. Book a seat via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/artist-film-screening-hermione-kingdom-of-the-sick-tickets-867581849667

About the film

In 2017 artist Andy Holden came across a curious selection of eclectic paintings in a charity shop in his hometown of Bedford. The bold signature declared the artist’s name as, ‘Hermione’. Alongside the paintings was a copy of a self-published autobiography: Hermione Burton: A Journey Through the Paintings. The thin booklet contained Hermione’s story, which chronicled the major events of her life, including her struggle with ill health. Holden purchased all the paintings, as each appeared as if a frame from a film, feeling that if the paintings were not kept together her story would be lost.

Holden’s subsequent turned these previously unseen paintings into the subject of his film, which slips between animated biopic, documentary and speculation. Through simple animation made with a combination of computer game software and motion capture, the film reanimates Hermione allowing her digital surrogate to narrate her story. Hermione’s voice and facial expressions are provided by Sarah Cracknell, singer with iconic British pop group Saint Etienne, and the band also provide an original soundtrack to the film. Using the names written on the reverse of a few canvases Holden tracked down some of those who had known this local, ‘outsider’ artist, and the film is intercut with revelatory interviews.

As the film unfolds Holden’s familiar, enquiring voice-over shifts the interpretation of Hermione’s paintings to within his own ongoing enquiries into differing experiences of time. When disrupted by sickness or grief our experience of time is ruptured and for Holden this becomes the unacknowledged subject of Hermione’s paintings. By rescuing and retelling Hermione’s story, the film tenderly asks how much a person can be understood through interpreting the work they left behind.

Bios

Andy Holden (Born Bedford 1982)

Andy Holden’s work comprises of large installations, sculpture, painting, pop music, performance, animation, curating and multi-screen-videos. His work is often defined by very personal starting points used to arrive at more abstract philosophical questions.

His first major exhibition was ‘Art Now: Andy Holden’ at TATE Britain (2010), in which he exhibited Pyramid Piece, an enormous knitted rock based on a piece of pyramid that he stole from the Great Pyramid of Giza as a boy and later returned. Solo exhibitions of his work have included Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time (2011) at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Cookham Erratics at the Benaki Museum in Athens (2012). In 2011 Holden’s exhibition at Cubitt in London took the form of a library which explored the notion of ‘Thingly Time’. As a teenager Holden wrote a manifesto for art titled “Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity”, and this was revisited as a video installation at the Zabludowicz Collection (2013), Spike Island (2014) and Kunsthalle Winterthur (2015).

Between 2011-2017 Holden worked on Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, a hour-long animated film which explored the idea that the world was now best understood as a cartoon and examined how physics works in an animated universe. The film was first shown at Glasgow International 2016 and later as part of the Future Generations Art Prize at Venice Biennale in 2017 and in numerous solo exhibitions including MOCA Toronto. Natural Selection (2017), commissioned by Artangel, was made in collaboration with his father Peter Holden and his films utilised a detailed exploration of birds nests and egg collecting to explore questions of mankind’s changing relation to the natural word, as well as the father-son relationship.

Holden curated Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules at Somerset House in 2021 and has previously curated World as Cartoon at Tate Britain (2017). In 2021 a book of interviews with Holden was published by Slimvolume under the title Collected Free Labour. His work is in the permanent collections of Tate, Arts Council Collection, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery and numerous public and private collections in Europe. His work was recently included in British Art Show 9 and in 2024 his work will be shown at Tate St Ives and Kroller Muller Museum in the Netherlands.

Tim Smith-Laing

Tim Smith-Laing is a writer, lecturer and critic based in London. He taught at Oxford from 2011-2014, focusing on literature, cultural history and the history and theory of criticism, before leaving academia to concentrate on writing. A regular lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he runs the Contemporary Art Summer School and teaches on the Executive Master in Cultural Leadership, he is a book critic at The Daily Telegraph, and writes on art for Apollo, Frieze, and the Literary Review. His current projects are a cultural history of luck and a novel based on the life of eighteenth-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.