Holding

Holding is an intertwined series of works exploring the things we hold and contain for ourselves and for others.

Holding, 2024 - (ongoing)

In our life we hold so much. Holding pain, expectations, insecurities, grief. Grief for our loved ones, climate grief, grief about the state of the world, grief over genocide.

We hold anger and disappointment. Over our treatment of First Nations people. For the so many deaths of women at the hands of their partners. For apathy.

We guard and contain. Our feelings, our children, our bodies. We support, we organise, protect and grow.

We hold our anxieties, our relationships, our families. We are trapped, obscured, held back. Buried.

We crack, leak, weep. Ferment and fester. We hold on for dear life.

We collapse, we break, we let go, we fall apart.

Shown at Glimpse Art Space in May 2024.

Review by Kannitha Lim

Holding (I don’t know what you expect)

2024 - 2025

Selected Photographs showing at Hysterical Legacies, October 8th - 24th 2025, Birnbeal Gallery, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre, Naarm/Melbourne.

A lifetime of holding things. Holding things in, holding for others, holding it together.

Holding pain, expectations, insecurities, shame and grief. Grief for what could have been and for what never will be.

A lifetime of pain, being dismissed, misunderstood, and disregarded.

We guard and contain. Our feelings, our children, our bodies. We support, we organise, protect and grow.

We hold our anxieties, our relationships, our families. We are trapped, obscured, held back.

Buried.

We crack, leak, weep. Ferment and fester. We hold on for dear life.

We collapse, we break, we let go, we fall apart. We re-emerge.

Melanie Hoult is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm. She is drawn to working with natural materials, with a particular love for installation and ceramics. Melanie is passionate about social justice, the environment and our place in it. Her current series of work explores themes of fragility and strength, love and grief, and the connections we weave.

Melanie is a member of SLOWPOKE - Slow Power Collective, co-runs Glimpse Art Space in Northcote, and makes functional ceramics as Night Forest Studio.

After a couple of decades of holding on to (and refusing to let go of) her desire to make art while life had other ideas, Melanie has spent the last couple of years coming back to and embracing her art practice.