Jonathan Houlding is a British artist whose work spans drawing, objects, digital image making and the construction of real and imagined space. Educated at Wimbledon School of Art, Kingston University and the Royal College of Art, he has maintained an independent body of work alongside a career that has moved between art, education, curating and film.
Drawing has remained central throughout. His work moves between architectural and psychological space, abstraction, objects and more intuitive forms of image making, often returning to questions of interiority, memory, place and the unstable relationship between the physical and imagined world. Rather than working within a single medium or recognisable formal language, Houlding has allowed different methods of making to develop in parallel, with ideas migrating between drawing, three dimensional form, digital space and physical environments.
His work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally and is held in public, institutional and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Council, UCL Art Museum, Sammlung Lenikus and the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca. Exhibitions have included Drawing Biennial at Drawing Room, London; All That Is Left at Sammlung Lenikus, Vienna; and Greymatter at the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca.
Alongside his own work, Houlding has had a sustained involvement in art education. He has taught in universities across fine art, design and film, including at the Royal College of Art, London Metropolitan University, University for the Creative Arts and the National Film and Television School. At the Royal College of Art he established a unit concerned with interdisciplinarity, the exchange between fine art and design, reflecting a longstanding interest in what can occur when conventional distinctions between disciplines are allowed to become porous.
From 2008 to 2011 he co-founded and directed SE8, an independent non profit art space supported by Arts Council England. Over three years, SE8 presented the work of more than 100 artists through exhibitions, commissions and projects, bringing together emerging and established international artists. The programme included work by Anthony McCall, Martha Rosler, John Smith, Andrea Büttner, Hans Op de Beeck, Dryden Goodwin and many others. Curating became an extension of Houlding's wider thinking about art: a means of creating relationships between works, ideas, artists and the spaces in which they are encountered.
His parallel career in film has taken him into the construction of environments on a very different scale. Working internationally as a production designer and art director has extended his engagement with architecture, material, image and space, while retaining a clear distinction between collaborative work for film and his work as an artist.
Across these different activities, there is a persistent movement between making and thinking, between the intimate act of drawing and the construction of space. Teaching, curating, film and art have not developed as separate careers so much as different territories within a life spent making, looking at and thinking through images and objects.
Film website: jonathanhoulding.com