Brooke Holm

Brooke Holm has travelled to some of the world's most beautiful and vulnerable wild locations including, the melting ice caps of Svalbard in Norway, the Namibian Desert, the protected algae grasslands at Shark Bay in Australia and more recently Death Valley. In her new work, the artist continues her fascination with the cosmos working with NASA to document the surface of the moon.

Brooke Holm is an American photo-media artist. Holm connected with photography from a young age as a means to observe the natural world she encountered whilst travelling between Australia and the US visiting parents. Her deep appreciation for Earth’s landscapes and her subsequent investigations into the tension and bonds between humans and the natural world. Searching for unconventional ways in which to portray the world, she took to the skies to photograph landscapes from helicopters and planes. She aims to inspire new perspectives and holistic views of our home by disrupting the scale at which we typically consume the natural world.

Brooke's abstract compositions of our planet can be compared to a view which only astronauts would see looking down on Earth from space.

Brooke Holm's work has been exhibited internationally in the UK, Australia, USA and France. In 2019 her work was included in the Every Woman Biennial, in the same year she was selected for The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency in Svalbard, Norway. In 2021 she was selected for a studio residency at MASS MoCA. Brooke Holm's work is held in private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Europe.

In 2020 before the pandemic, Brooke Holm visited Death Valley in the USA to continue to develop her research that draws on visual similarities between Death Valley national park with the topography of Mars.

Deserts are of particular interest to Brooke Holm, for the way they harbour and sustain life despite the environmental extremes. She compares the similarities of the landscape at Death Valley, scared by drained river basins, erosion and seismic events with other terrestrial planets in our solar system.

Approximately 3.8 billion years ago, the surface of Mars showed more properties that are more comparable to the surface of our Earth today.

"My research and creation of this project has involved searching through hundreds of thousands of images of Mars captured by the highest resolution camera that exists, the HiRise camera which was built by the University of Arizona/Ball Aerospace & Technologies - I have edited, curated and compared these images with my images of Earth, creating a stunning resemblance and visual connection between the two planets."

Brooke Holm's fascination with space, time and existence on Earth has traditionally led her to photograph landscapes from aerial viewpoints, often drawing inspiration from NASA satellite imagery.

In 2018 she was selected by NASA to photograph at the Michoud Rocket Assembly Facility in New Orleans and was invited back in December 2019 to document the completion of the core stage of the upcoming Artemis missions, visit Stennis Space Center and attend a launch from Kennedy Space Center.

This work forms part of an ongoing series for the artist, exploring humans' relationship to space and how spatial factors can affect us physically and mentally. This includes both the environmental space around us, spaces we create here on Earth, outer space and the potential for a new residence beyond our familiar territory.

In exploring our place within the greater macrocosm, Brooke is interested in whether concepts of connection and coexistence within our universe are more discernible when altering the observational and experiential norms of everyday perspective.

Sand Sea is a series of work shot in 2019 in the oldest desert in the world in Namibia where the dunes tower hundreds of meters into the sky. In Sand Sea, Brooke photographs the shifting light captured at both dawn and dusk, against the topography of the dune peaks, creating stimulating abstractions in dusty pinks and burnt red hues.

From overhead, the horizon disappears from view, allowing for the most intimate details to be accentuated. From this perspective, the dunes bear a resemblance to the human form, an array of flesh tones blending and cascading in a symphony, bringing to mind our complicated relationship with nature and its magnetic pull on the human subconscious.

Namibia was the first country in the world to have a national policy on climate change and is recognised as one of the countries vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The predicted increases in temperature and evaporation as well as increased variability of rainfall will exacerbate the existing challenges that Namibia is facing as the driest country south of the Sahara.

*extract from Sand Sea catalogue, self-published by the artist.

In 2018 the artist visited Lake Tyrrell, a shallow salt-crusted depression in the south of Australia and what is Victoria’s largest salt lake covering roughly 51,500 acres.

Brooke visited the lake and learnt from the early evidence of human habitation which was found at the site, it is perhaps the oldest human evidence among Victoria and Tasmania. In this historically profound site, Brooke shares her appreciation from an aerial perspective, creating abstract visuals of the shallow crusted lake in a swirl of texture and colour.

"Nature is deeply embedded within the human collective unconscious, yet there is a profound tension to the way we exist in the world. I see our attempts to separate ourselves from the environment as a philosophical conundrum. Physical infrastructure, exploitation and extraction from the Earth, self-appointed dominion and ownership over land and animals, have again and again shown a human exercise of power seeking to increase our livelihood at the expense of all living things, including - paradoxically - ourselves. 

 

My sensitivity towards the biophilic began with early immersion in, and connection to, the nature that surrounded me, and subsequently led to questions about how and if I belong to nature. My work and search for answers has taken me to some far reaches of the globe… otherworldly places that leave me astounded at the beauty of our home. Importantly, viewing Earth’s landscapes as otherworldly in itself is a consequence of the separation we have come to accept. 

 

Recognizing this conflict and seeking to understand it are driving factors behind my determination to create work that reflects the challenges of living in and effectively documenting, a changing world. In reconnecting people to nature with visual representations of our home, can we begin to dismantle the idea of separation and instead focus on coexistence?"