Artist Flags // What Looks To Be A Piece Of Fruit & Loose Teeth And Stinking Breath
Holly Graham

We are proud to launch two newly commissioned flags in Southwark Park, by artist Holly Graham. The flags titled ‘What Looks To Be A Piece Of Fruit’ and ‘Loose Teeth And Stinking Breath’ form part of To Us It Just Looks Like A Lemon a collection of works by Holly, which is the outcomes of her residency at Southwark Park Galleries in 2019.

Both flags draw on research and thinking around food and movement, shared in workshops with local young refugees and asylum seekers during the residency, and refer to her commissioned text that acknowledges the difficult colonial contexts of the Mayflower story.

The works focus on the historically recognised medicinal qualities of citrus fruits, discovered in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to be an antidote to the scurvy many European sailors contracted on long expansionist sea-faring voyages. The flags incorporate imagery carried over from previous bodies of work that considered the symbolic value of lemons, and fragments of photographs that document the unloading of citrus fruits on the local docks in the mid-20^th century.

Listen to ‘To Us It Just Looks Like A Lemon’ by Holly Graham

Read To Us It Just Looks Like A Lemon

Holly Graham is a London-based artist, working predominantly with print and audio. Much of her work looks at ways in which memory and narrative shape collective histories. Holly undertook her BFA at Oxford University in 2012 and graduated from MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2014. Recent exhibitions and projects include: No winder you canna catch fish, Gaada, Shetland (2020); #FridayFact, Goldsmiths CCA, Online (2020); On Board II, Art Licks & Espacio Vista, Madrid (2019); BOUNDS, Skelf, Online (2019); The Oval Window, Gerald Moore Gallery, London (2019); The Romance of Flowers, Kingsgate Projects, London (2018); Common Third, Copperfield, London (2018); Carefully Cleansed of Labour and Softened by Cooking, Compressor, London (2018); Sweet Swollen, Jerwood Visual Arts: Project Space, London (2018). Holly is Head of Artist Development at Turf Projects, Croydon, and is Co-Founder of Cypher BILLBOARD, London.

‘What Looks To Be A Piece Of Fruit & Loose Teeth And Stinking Breath’ are generously supported by British Land.

‘To Us It Just Looks Like A Lemon’ is generously supported by the Southwark Mayflower 400 Grants Fund from Southwark Council, British Land and United St Saviours; and with huge thanks to our friends at Bosco Centre.