Artwork Description
Walk along almost any South African beach and you will find them — pebbles and fragments of shell, tumbled and smoothed by the sea until they are almost indistinguishable from one another, and yet each entirely unique. In Scatterlings, Laurel Holmes gathers them together and asks us to pay attention.
The painting is a quiet act of devotion to the overlooked. Holmes renders each piece with remarkable precision — the warm amber glow of a worn pebble, the chalky surface of a shell fragment, the surprising cool blue-black of a single stone that catches the eye amid the pale scatter of the rest. They are arranged across a soft grey surface with the same casual grace you might find them on a tideline, as though the sea has just retreated.
Scatterlings is a painting about the small treasures we pocket on a beach walk and then line up on a windowsill, never quite sure why we can't leave them behind. Holmes understands exactly why.
Keywords: pebbles,
