\u2018It\u2019s magical,\u201d says Loie Hollowell. \u201cIt\u2019s such good timing!\u201d The artist, speaking via Zoom from her studio in Queens, New York, is referring to the Artemis II moon mission. Little did she know, when she named her latest painting series Overview Effect, after the term used by astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space and the profound feelings of awe and interconnectedness it provokes, that she\u2019d be coinciding with this space odyssey. But she is not surprised anyone would want to leave Earth for a while. \u201cWe\u2019re having so many problems here,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Overview Effect, currently at London\u2019s Pace Gallery, features large-scale canvases combining twin concave and convex sculpted circles. If you folded the canvasses in half vertically, the halves would fit perfectly together. The works, which radiate outwards in rings of glorious colour that are both vibrant and soothing, are a continuation of earlier works focusing on pregnancy and birth through abstraction. Her Split Orb paintings and Dilation Stage series of pastel drawings responded to the difficult birth of her son in a New York hospital. Overview Effect is a result of her daughter\u2019s easier arrival: a \u201ccosmic\u201d home birth that she found far more empowering.<\/p>\n
Hollowell painting a work from the Overview Effect series. Photograph: Melissa Goodwin\/\u00a9 Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery<\/p>\n
The work that came from the first birth, she says, was more diagrammatic, like a self-portrait: \u201cIt\u2019s me from the outside looking at a pregnant body. The second was more internal. I was much more present.\u201d Hollowell is \u201ca sci-fi nerd\u201d, so it\u2019s no surprise she looked to space to capture the out-of-body experience she had during that second labour.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was giving birth, there was a moment in between the contractions where the pain was so deep and so all encompassing that I was probably going to pass out. I kind of came above [myself]. Since I was sitting up, I could look down and see my daughter\u2019s head coming out. And somehow the vision from above was also my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hence the twin circles of her compositions, so abstract you\u2019d not know what they represented if you weren\u2019t given the rationale. Go downstairs, and her more bodily (and yes, genital) pastel works help you trace the artist\u2019s thought processes. The underpinning is deeply, viscerally corporeal: abortion, conception, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding.<\/p>\n
Hollowell was born in 1983 and raised in Woodland, California. Her father, a painter, worked and her mother, a seamstress and cartoonist, stayed at home with the children. \u201cMy mom had four kids and she was just like, \u2018Oh, I popped them out. Go and pop them out!\u2019\u201d Hollowell says. \u201cAnd then she breastfed all of us until we were like five or six. She made it sound very easy. And it\u2019s just not easy. It\u2019s so hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let-down, 2022. Photograph: Melissa Goodwin\/Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s a form of survival to only remember the good parts, I say. Hollowell is laughing. \u201cI look back and I\u2019m like, I can see the signs of the repressed soul!\u201d<\/p>\n
As well as the great American modernists, O\u2019Keeffe included, Hollowell loves Louise Bourgeois, and cites Luchita Hurtado\u2019s birth paintings as a major influence. She wasn\u2019t only looking at other visual artists for inspiration, though. Instagram photographs of home births also fed into her practice, as did the Ina May Gaskin childbirth book she read during pregnancy. She opens it and shows me one of the photographs in it. \u201cIt\u2019s funny because all the pictures are kind of symmetrical, you know, there\u2019s like legs spread, vagina in the centre. And that was the kind of compositional structure I was already doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Loie Hollowell: \u2018I\u2019m able to speak more openly now.\u2019 Photograph: Zach Hilty\/BFA.com\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
I mention the misogynistic snottiness towards artists such as O\u2019Keeffe, or the feminists of the 1970s: this notion that they\u2019re all just obsessed with their own vaginas. There\u2019s this idea (a patriarchal one, to my mind) that great abstract artists are supposed to transcend the body, so I wonder if she felt a pressure to keep the more corporeal underpinnings under wraps, or \u201cout of the press release\u201d as she puts it. \u201cAs people, especially male collectors, have become more comfortable with my image-making, I\u2019m able to speak more openly about what the influences on my practice are or what my inspirations are,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen I first started showing, I didn\u2019t talk about the works, some of which are at the London show, being influenced by an abortion I had. But over the years, especially with the help of female curators, putting me into museum shows, I\u2019ve been able to highlight that original inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tension between the abstract and the figurative is something Hollowell is still wrestling with. How to \u201cblend\u201d the two, especially when \u201cabstraction sells\u201d? \u201cWith the art market being what it is is, we really get pigeonholed into this one thing and it\u2019s hard to break out of that,\u201d she says. As well as her pastel drawings, which more obviously represent vulvas and breasts and have such pleasing titles as Happy Vagina, Boob Wheel, and The Let Down, Hollowell also makes body casts and is collaborating on some paintings with her children. These works would have once felt doomed to be taken less seriously, but I feel optimistic that the constructed barrier between the physical and the abstract that Hollowell is banging her head against can be dismantled.<\/p>\n
\u2018Such good timing!\u2019 \u2026 Overview Effect in Blue With Small Yellow Mandorla, 2025. Photograph: Melissa Goodwin\/\u00a9 Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t all art created by bodies, anyway? \u201cWhen I think about making the earlier works, I was super horny,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019d think about sex all the time, and 1777308129 I don\u2019t think about sex any more,\u201d she says, of the under-explored role of hormones in the making of visual art. Now is perimenopause, then menopause.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel so in control, in a way that I haven\u2019t felt in the past, and that\u2019s so interesting. The art will change again. My favourite artists really blossomed in their 50s and 60s, and I can see why.\u201d<\/p>\n
We talk about the shapeshifting nature of Bourgeois\u2019s practice, how she refused to be hamstrung by one definition of what it meant to be an artist. Thankfully times are continuing to change. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I could have made this work 20 years ago,\u201d Hollowell says. \u201cIt would have been really rare to be able to do that and be a mother.\u201d<\/p>\n