Holly Osborne reflects on stereotypes, ideals and mundanity, using drawing and painting as a vehicle. She is a collector of images, gathering material from a range of different sources – stock photos, screenshots, vintage knitting patterns, adverts, social media, etc. Osbornes artistic practice draws from contemporary sources, finding images mostly from online. She engages with our relationship to image in the PostInternet condition, working from photos taken from television, her phone or even directly from the moving image onscreen as life drawing. Recent works have been exploring the idea of the nuclear family. Staged, awkward figures come into play, questioning our aspirations. Engaging with a disquieting humour, she aims to unsettle and seduce with these darkly comical characters. Crude yet witty depictions that grasp the fallacy of image and our perception of others.

She is a drawer and painter primarily, often working with very basic materials like cheap felt pens and pencils then translating these seemingly unsophisticated figures into oil paintings. She considers these paintings as large-scale drawings, adopting smaller brushes to recreate the feeling of scribbling on paper. Recent works have been thinly painted, blurring and bleeding, layered up and rubbed back. Although fascinated by flat image, she maintains a strong observational drawing practice, drawing objects and capturing family members around the home.

Osborne is currently based in the Highlands of Scotland.