2026 - Solo Exhibition
Ash Holmes ‘Vessels’ 09 - 24 October
Pre-sale catalogue now available (below)
OPENING NIGHT DETAILS
Friday 9th October 2026 between 6PM - 8PM.
HAKE HOUSE Gallery: 275 Harbord Road, Dee Why, 2096 Sydney, Australia.
Show Notes - ‘Vessels’
Vessels considers the structures that carry, contain and protect us. The body, our environment, the landscape, relationships and family.
Across the works, Ash Holmes explores inheritance and memory through recurring themes of water, movement, landscape and concealment. Central to the exhibition is a lineage of female artists within Holmes’ family, where creativity has been passed between generations as a way of seeing and understanding the world. The ocean becomes both subject and language within the work. Vessels move through its surface, while rock formations hold, direct and contain its flow. These forms become metaphors for the body as a vessel, something capable of holding emotion, memory and experience. Water moves between these structures, shifting from one form to another, suggesting the continual movement of what we carry and what we inherit.
Holmes approaches each painting as a composition of marks, allowing gesture, rhythm and repetition to build movement across the surface. The works are intended to feel like an orchestra of marks, where individual gestures come together to create a larger rhythm, much like the shifting currents within the sea. The marks move between control and instinct, creating moments of stillness, tension and release. Camouflage, inherited through the history of Holmes’ great-grandmother, becomes a recurring language within the work. Removed from its traditional function of concealment, it becomes a meditation on visibility, protection and the ways we adapt ourselves to our surroundings.
Upcycled sailcloth further extends these ideas. Weathered by use and marked by its own history, the material carries traces of movement, place and experience before becoming a surface for painting. The sail becomes a vessel in itself, holding one history while becoming the carrier of another.
Vessels asks what holds us.
About Ash Holmes.
Ash Holmes (b. 1994, Sydney) is a fourth-generation, self-taught artist based on Gadigal Land (Sydney, NSW, Australia). Her large-scale abstract works are characterised by gestural brushstrokes, a refined use of colour psychology, and an intuitive, process-driven approach. Drawing inspiration from nature and landscapes she has recently experienced, Holmes creates delicate yet powerful compositions that merge the energy of Abstract Expressionism with elements of landscape painting to form dreamlike, immersive works.
Her practice, grounded in colour psychology, explores the sensory and emotional impact of colour. Through repeated marks and fluid layering of oil and acrylic, her paintings evoke memory, terrain, and shifting light. Holmes invites viewers into a sensory dialogue with the landscape, using harmonious tones and expressive gestures to narrate personal and place-based experiences.
Since 2017, Holmes has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, in 2025, she exhibited at Christoffer Egelund Gallery (Copenhagen), Circle Contemporary Gallery (United Kingdom), and HAKE, HOUSE OF ART Gallery (Australia). She has been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, Lloyd Rees Memorial Award, and Premio Combat Prize, and her work is held in private collections across Australia, New Zealand, the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Holmes is currently represented internationally by Christoffer Egelund Gallery (Copenhagen) and Circle Contemporary Gallery (UK), and within Australia by HAKE, HOUSE OF ART Gallery.
2025 - Diffused Glow
‘Diffused Glow’ by Ash Holmes
My practice is rooted in observation, a process of bearing witness to both the external world and the quiet interior spaces it stirs. I see myself as a vessel between these realms, gathering moments as they unfold and translating them into form. Each brushstroke becomes a record of presence, a gesture that preserves what is otherwise fleeting.
Light, sound, and atmosphere are central to my work. I am drawn to the way they diffuse, soften, and eventually fade, how the glow of the sky, the resonance of an orchestra, or the light captured by a lens can dissolve into memory. My paintings seek to hold these thresholds between presence and absence, stillness and motion, remembering and forgetting.
Through my work, I invite viewers to pause within these moments, to inhabit the delicate spaces where time slows and emotion lingers — to witness, as I do, the world as it slips quietly into light.
– Ash Holmes
2024 - Body Of Waters
‘Body of Waters’ / Ash Holmes
Surrendering all control, allowing the elemental wisdom of water to guide the direction of Ash Holmes’ new body of works, Body of Waters. Water, ever powerful—both fast and slow, formless and free—shapes each canvas. The process began with an accident, a winter flood that soaked fabric and left behind organic marks on the floor. From this serendipity, a new practice was born: fabric and paint immersed in water, draped and fermented over days, leaving behind mysteries on the surface of the canvas. The outcome is always unknown, the final image a reflection of the water’s will.
Each piece in this series emerges from this delicate balance of chance and intention, surrendering to water’s uncontrollable force. Holmes’ works blur the boundary between landscape and abstraction, inviting us to reflect on the fluidity of form and emotion. Like Narcissus gazing into his first mirror, these paintings reflect back something deeper—an invitation to look within and see where we are, emotionally and spiritually.
Water, with its mythical connection to life, birth, and reflection, becomes both the subject and the process. It reminds us of the unpredictable currents of life—beautiful in their imperfection, powerful in their unpredictability. In Body of Waters, Holmes captures the allure of water’s formlessness, letting it transform her canvases into living, breathing works.
- Words by Venn Miles.
2023 - Home For A While
'Home For A While' / Ash Holmes
The notion of ‘home’ has been an area of reflection Artist Ash Holmes has considered for some time, but especially came to fruition whilst completing her first international Artist in Residency at Saruya Air, Fujiyoshida Japan in June of this year. Being able to detach from her day-to-day routine and materials often used, Holmes found that home was within herself when she was in a state of creativity, that her practice is the grounding force of familiarity and her sense of safety, not her external environment.
Japanese culture often speaks of slowing down, creating intentionally and making with longevity in mind, three pillars that speak true to Holmes’ ten long year practice where she consciously reflects and evolves, painting and creating heavily inspired by landscapes and colour psychology. With fabrics, paints, paper and wood blocks bought from art stores all throughout Japan, this body of work truly honours Holmes’s creativity and her flexibility within her work, and how easily she slips into her sense of home when leaning on her practice.
Through viewing ‘home for a while’, there are nods to ancestry as a fourth generation Artist and the progression of her pieces, stating there is no real start or end point but more so one continuous line of thought and experiences put into canvas, drawing or ceramics. While much of the inspiration for her latest exhibition was dreamt up at Saruya Air, staying in a beautiful 100 year old Japanese house with tatami rooms and an open plan studio below, Holmes finds her work still progressing months after completing her residency and always referring back to what her practice provides, not only herself but others and the world around.
Images below are a mix of installation view images from HAKE, HOUSE GALLERY and film images from being in residence in Japan (SARUYA A.I.R.)
‘Soft Machine' by Ash Holmes
130 x 180cm
Oil and acrylic on canvas. Framed in Tasmanian Oak.
ENQUIRY
This piece is an original by Ash Holmes created across 2026, for her solo exhibition Vessels. Please find shipping information for this piece, or please enquire here.