Neuro Blooms - Leslie Holt

Neuro Blooms
Leslie Holt
Tuesday July 20 - Aug 31 in Mentrum
Friday July 23 - Aug 20 in Beautiful Distress House

From Friday July 23 visual artist Leslie Holt presents her project Neuro Blooms in Beautiful Distress House, an exhibition of Leslie Holt’s Brain Stain and Unspeakable series. The exhibit addresses contemporary and historical views of mental health conditions and treatments. 

Opening and artist talk at Beautiful Distress House: Friday, July 23, 5:30-7:00 pm

Neuro Blooms 
Neuro Blooms harnesses the power of art to make mental health conditions visible and beautiful. Neuro Blooms imagery is based on PET scans of people with mental health conditions which reveal unique maps of brain activity and function. Holt’s work probes the visual beauty of PET scans, as well as their power to convey the brain’s role in mental illness. As a series within a body of work exploring mental illness and our beautiful brains, this work is rooted in Holt’s experience with depression as well as her mother’s struggle with bipolar disorder. Neuro Blooms imagery has catalyzed partnerships with organizations in the US and UK to help shape creative mental health campaigns.

The Neuro Blooms project began with Holt’s mixed media paintings called Brain Stains. In this work, she combines solid areas of stitched embroidery thread with saturated acrylic paint stains. The translation of digital imagery into the handmade explores the relationship between clinical data and more nuanced and subjective human experiences of mental conditions. Holt is interested in this combination of objective data with more poetic interpretation as a reflection of both corporeal and clinical experiences of mental illness.

In 2018 Holt partnered with Shiny Apple Studio to develop a series of enamel pins based on the art, initially envisioned as takeaway items to accompany exhibits. The pins proved to be very popular on social media, and Neuro Blooms grew into a large mental health advocacy project. The popularity of the pins demonstrates that people are eager to be honest about mental health and are using Neuro Blooms to tell their stories and combat stigma. A wide variety of people are engaging with the project, including family members, clinicians, social workers, educators, and researchers.

The exhibit also includes work from Holt’s series Unspeakable, in which she translates imagery of women in states of extreme emotion into stitched drawings on acrylic stained canvasses. Unspeakable began with imagery of distressed women from art historical sources such as the work of Picasso and Kathe Kollwitz. Holt expanded the references to include clinical sketches and photographs of institutionalized women from the 19th century, most of whom were diagnosed with hysteria. Clinicians drew, sculpted and photographed these patients, sometimes trying to induce symptoms for their study, and often putting the women on display for public lectures. The women have exaggerated and often sexualized poses that are sometimes grotesque and vulgar, reflecting distortions of emotional distress. In Holt’s work, the stitched figures are isolated and suspended in other-worldly spaces, distant from their original context, stains of saturated acrylic paint hovering over and through them. The sewn marks are intimate and tender in contrast to the drips and bleeding of the paint. The stains hold history of unknown pain and reveal unruly, wordless memories.

In this provocative exhibition, Holt’s works offer unique insights and reflections upon contemporary and historical views of mental health conditions and their treatments. Technological developments over the centuries have certainly changed the visual lenses through which clinicians - and by extension the larger society - view mental health conditions. The reference material of the two bodies of work—from hand-drawn sketches to colorful digital scans-- are very different, but both the Brain Stain and Unspeakable series delve into human experiences that can be inexplicable, uniquely individual, and stretch way beyond the reach of systems by which we try to categorize and understand them.

Leslie Holt is a US artist living in Hyattsville, MD. Holt will also be one of our next artists in residence at the Kings County Hospital starting next year (after Covid forced its cancellation this year).

Mentrum - Mental Health Centre
Concurrent to the exhibit, large Neuro Bloom graphics will cover the windows of the Mentrum Mental Health Centre in Amsterdam. There will be an opening and reception at the Mentrum Mental Health Centre on Tuesday, July 20, from 5:00 - 6:30 pm.
Address: Eerste Constantijn Huygenstraat 38, Amsterdam. 

This exhibition was created in collaboration with Beautiful Distress and Mentrum.

Opening hours Beautiful Distress House:
Thursday    11:00–18:00
Friday         11:00–18:00
Saturday     12:00–18:00
Sunday       12:00–18:00