Holly Stevenson's art practice explores Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray and last cigar as a metaphor with which to discuss the concept of femininity. Her ceramic sculpture diligently embodies the ashtray and cigar as though they were two gendered forms, the yonic ovular dish representing the female and the cylindrical phallic cigar the male. In the studio she habitually re-makes these forms in clay, reconfiguring them into a figurative language of her own with which to engage in the issues of being female.  

 

Recently she has been selected for the Mother Art Prize 2020 and a New Commission by Procreate Project funded by the Arts Council England. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design Fine Art MA in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker Foundation. Her graduate degree show featured in The Creative Cities Collection, Beijing and Future Map IIat the Zabludowicz Collection. She was awarded the MFI Flat Time House Graduate Award, supported by the John Latham Foundation and has held a Guest Fellowship at UAL.