The Bauhaus existed for a short span of time but the potentials intrinsic in its principles have only begun to be realised. The sources of design remain forever full of changing possibilities. The Bauhaus is dead. Long live the Bauhaus. - Herbert Bayer, 1984
The Bauhaus continues as a major design influence for contemporary practitioners. Julia Holderness’s installations and artworks draw upon art and design histories and archives – both local and international, real and imagined. A collection of Bauhaus publications that were purchased from an ex-library sale forms a personal archive of art resources. These were often the starting point for her own early art-making as a teenager and have recently been used in her investigations into Bauhaus influence in New Zealand. In this applique series, Holderness has reproduced the covers of Bauhaus textile reference books.
Holderness is currently undertaking a practice led PhD at AUT. Her research project aims to take art history out of fixed written analysis and prescribed retrospective exhibition formats, proposing a more porous, subjective and interactive relationship for herself as the researcher and artist and potential readers and audiences. Conflating various historic design movements and periods, her project is concerned with creating connections, producing a flexible version of the past that is fabricated out of endless copies, reproductions and influences. The archives in this project act as design sources, full of potentiality and “changing possibilities” (Bayer 1984: 25).
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