The Fine Threads of an Independent Artist
Holly Allan
"There's so much I want to make. I just hope I can continue making it."
Holly's studio is something of a dream set-up for any independent artist, and the privilege is not lost on her. This space is her haven, beyond simply being a place to work. Sometimes her husband, Sam, finds her sitting outside reading a book while birds move through the garden and the neighbour's cat drops by to say hello.
For Holly, being an artist is about more than making art; it's about a life that comes with it.
“There’s so much I want to make”, she tells me, “I just hope I can continue making it”.
It is an idyllic picture, but it also poses an interesting question. How does an artist protect this way of life?
Making art and making a living are not always symbiotic. Today's artists are expected to produce much more than pieces. They are entrepreneurs, marketers, photographers, videographers, promoters and social media managers, each role demanding time and attention that might otherwise have been spent making the work itself.
Then come the outside influences; mentors offer experience, parents share expectations, galleries know what sells, algorithms reward consistency, while audiences return to the work they recognise. While none of these things is inherently bad, each has the potential to nudge the work in a particular direction, raising a more concerning question: at what point do those influences begin shaping not only the art, but the artist making it?
Long before Holly found herself confronting those questions, she was simply trying to discover what kind of artist she wanted to become.
holly allan
Pinpointing an Origin Story
"I loved making things with my hands. I found this old piece of canvas, started sewing again, and just thought, 'I love the slow process of it. I could take my time.'"
Speaking with Holly, it becomes apparent that you cannot trace the beginning of her artistic journey to one singular moment. Instead, it is a collection of experiences that converged. Sure, one could argue that her sewing interests date back to her childhood, when she enthusiastically cut up her own clothes to make outfits for her dolls (she tells me her sewing materials were swiftly confiscated after the incident), but this feels like a small slice of a bigger whole.
Equally, you could look to her long-standing love of photography. Travelling through places such as Hong Kong, Holly became fascinated by the relationship between nature and human-made structures, documenting them through a lens. However, she explains that photography never quite communicated why she saw beauty: "I love photography," she says, "but I get over prints quite quickly. What I love about embroidery is how easily you can layer everything." Rather than reproducing the photograph, Holly pulls it apart. A building is stitched first, before the surrounding plants are embroidered almost as a separate image in a different colour. The result isn't a faithful recreation of the scene, but an exaggeration of the relationship that interested her in the first place.
Looking back, these early interests all point towards the same instinct: Holly has always enjoyed making things with her hands. That became even more apparent during university, although the path to that realisation was anything but straightforward.
Holly possesses an imagination that searches beyond the obvious; a quality that, in the structured environment of education, can sometimes be mistaken for misunderstanding the brief. She tells me about one of her first projects from her time studying Graphic Design. "We had to do this project over summer where we had to come up with a slogan, and it had to have some kind of 'meaning' behind it."
That summer, Holly had travelled through Lebanon, where she witnessed the lives of Syrian refugees. Returning to university, she created an original typeface composed entirely of guns and grenades, then mounted photographs she had taken of refugee children on a large wooden board. To complete the work, she asked her grandfather to fire a shotgun through the piece, adding a literal act of violence to a project exploring the consequences of conflict.
"I then brought the piece to uni," she recalls. "My teacher was just like, 'I think you've misunderstood what we were asking.' Everyone else had a product they were making. It was a slogan for a new cereal or something, and much of the work had been done on computers." While many of her classmates saw it as a branding or commercial exercise, Holly instinctively gravitated toward something more conceptual.
Realising Graphic Design wasn't the right fit, she switched degrees to Illustration and Visual Media. However, that feeling of displacement remained. After being pulled in different directions, introduced to countless disciplines, and encouraged to embrace increasingly digital ways of making, the sheer volume of possibility had become a weight. In this moment of mounting pressure, she instinctively turned towards something that offered comfort in its familiarity.
For Holly, that comfort wasn't her childhood dolls, but the sewing that had dressed them. She found a large piece of canvas, gathered together a handful of nearly forgotten travel sewing kits and began stitching. "I just loved the slow process of it," she says. "I could take my time."
Her university piece reflects on the Covid era, when confinement to our homes saw anxiety and poor mental health become an increasing concern. Many people found themselves dependent on their daily walks, offering moments of solace in the freedom to roam. The message is mirrored throughout the piece. The bottom layer appears almost chaotic; tangled threads and restless scribbles create the impression of a fractured mind. Yet, on closer inspection, those marks slowly reveal themselves to be hundreds of distorted faces. Much like poor mental health itself, they depict not who we truly are, but a distorted shell of our complete self. Growing across them is a dense layer of embroidered flowers. Nature does not erase the faces beneath. Instead, it gently overlaps them, suggesting that, while nature will not claim to heal everything, it provides a contrasting sense of relief.
Created under the time constraints of a university degree show, Holly never managed to finish the piece. While most people see a completed artwork, Holly still sees the version she had imagined. Today, it hangs not as a reminder of what was left unfinished, but as an ode to a beginning; a reminder that if you have a passion, trust it, as the process will naturally follow.
Holly Allan
Pulling on the Strings of Pressure
"It feels like a very lonely world. I sit and make the work alone, then I have to make all these decisions alone."
It is one thing to trust your instincts as a student. It is another when someone has placed their trust and money in your hands. Holly recalls the first time her process was truly tested through commissioned work. Unsurprisingly, the request was often deeply sentimental, carrying a new weight of expectation.
"I had a commission the other week for someone's wedding present," she tells me. "It was their engagement photo... and it just felt like a lot of pressure." The piece was small, but the scale only made the task more difficult. Unsatisfied with the result, Holly abandoned the first version. She then tossed the second. Weeks of work disappeared into the bin. "I had to do it like three times," she laughs. "I ended up throwing away the first two and then restarting. I was just like, 'Okay, I need to breathe, trust the process. It worked," she says. "I was frustrated, why didn't I just follow through and trust the process this whole time?"
Commission work was only one of the new pressures Holly found herself navigating. As her career developed, so too did the demands placed upon her as an artist. Creating the work was only one part of the job. Alongside it came the responsibility of finding an audience, maintaining an online presence, deciding whether to work with galleries, and making countless business decisions that are rarely mentioned in romantic ideas of an artist’s life.
"It feels like a very lonely world," she says. "I sit and make the work alone, then I have to make all these decisions alone. How does my aesthetic on Instagram feel? Does that look really cringe? Oh my God, if I make a reel, all my friends are going to see that."
Much of that pressure centres around visibility.
"I've found Instagram quite difficult," she admits. "I know I should be posting more, showing more, but it doesn't come naturally."
It is an interesting observation, not because it is unique to Holly, but because of where she has come from. Creativity doesn't just run through Holly's hands; it runs through her blood. Holly grew up in a family deeply embedded within Britain's contemporary art scene. Her mother is artist Rachel Howard, while her father spent decades working alongside Damien Hirst, helping deliver exhibitions around the world. Art was part of everyday life and family dinners often became impromptu tutorials.
"I'd sit down with them and be like, 'I'm thinking of this,' and we'd just go back and forth."
Yet the artistic landscape Holly inherited is markedly different from the one that shaped her parents. The Young British Artists emerged by challenging institutions, embracing publicity and demanding attention. The visibility you create for yourself was an act of rebellion. Today, visibility is almost a prerequisite.
"I don't really want to be filming myself getting ready for the studio or making videos all the time," Holly says. "One of the reasons I love making art is because it's the artwork you're looking at, not me."
An honest distinction, but it's an important one; the face of artistic rebellion has changed. Once, it was about fighting to be noticed. Today, perhaps the more radical act is to discreetly return the conversation to the work itself. Holly is careful not to reject the systems she works within. She speaks warmly of her family, acknowledges the opportunities social media has created and understands the importance of sharing her work with an audience. None of these things is the problem. Instead, she is continually searching for a way to navigate them without losing her love for embroidery or her sight of the artist she set out to become.
Holly Allan
Send Nudes
"I didn't want to fall into making them just because they sold."
For all the pressures surrounding her work, Holly refuses to confine herself to a single subject, moving freely between architecture, flowers, and the female form. When I ask why she continually moves between such different subjects, rather than settling into one recognisable style, the answer seems to lie in another question: which pieces do people keep coming back for?
During lockdown, Holly became involved in the Artist Support Pledge, an initiative encouraging artists to sell work for under £200 before reinvesting into another artist. It created a cycle of artists supporting artists, but it also introduced Holly's work to a far wider audience. It was on this platform she exhibited the nude pieces.
"They started getting snapped up", she recalls. "We were literally staying up all night packaging them." It was exciting, and for Holly, the validation was encouraging.
I understand their appeal. The pieces are striking. Multiple outlines of the female form overlap one another against vibrant geometric backdrops, creating a sense of movement that at first feels choreographed. Yet, the more time you spend with them, the more you question their intent. Are they dancing, or simply existing? Their poses feel oddly familiar at times. They could be the kinds of movements made in front of a mirror when nobody else is watching.
The women remain largely anonymous. Faces are left blank, and identity stripped back. Holly explains that facial expressions would dictate too much. Instead, she wants the viewer to read the feeling through body language alone. In that sense, the geometric background begins to feel almost psychological. The figures do not need exaggerated expressions because the emotion already exists around them. They give these understated, private, everyday movements an energy that feels almost triumphant; permission for women to occupy space, admire themselves and simply exist - you're not witnessing a performance, you're witnessing a celebration of self-acceptance.
Yet with the work's popularity, a new tension creeps in. The more successful they became, the less freedom she felt she had to move away from them. The work itself hadn't changed, but Holly's relationship with making it had. "It kind of lost the initial essence," Holly admits. "It started from this wanting to explore empowerment, the female form and all this beauty in it." As the pieces became reliable sellers, however, her reasons for making them began to shift. "That's not why I started."
These were works born out of a genuine desire to celebrate the female form, and she worried that continuing to make them primarily because they sold would, in some way, undermine the very sentiment they were created to express. When certain pieces sell more readily than others, there is an understandable temptation to repeat them. To make what people want, rather than what you feel compelled to create. Somewhere along that path lies a fine line between artist and factory, between creating from instinct and creating from expectation. Holly feared that if she remained on that path for too long, she might eventually fall out of love with the work altogether, its meaning slowly marred by its own commercial success.
There is an interesting irony - the very act of stepping away from her most popular work is what allows her to keep returning to it. In that sense, she preserves the series not by continually producing it, but by giving herself the freedom to leave it behind for a while before returning with a fresh perspective and renewed enthusiasm.
Holly Allan
An Invitation Into Holly's Mind
"I love that people hang them the wrong way round now."
As we end the interview, we circle back to her university work, the piece I was first drawn to.
It is by far the largest in the room, standing almost two and a half metres tall. I ask whether she ever feels the urge to work that large again.
"I'd love to," she confirms. "My mum's always like, 'Go bigger. Do bigger pieces.'" Holly laughs before adding, "I'm like, 'Easy for you to say. You paint.'" It is a fair point. Holly's concern is not ability; her university piece remains proof enough of that. It is practicality. For an embroiderer, every additional inch comes with another hour of stitching, the bigger the piece, the bigger the time commitment.
As we walk around the studio, Holly talks about the work she wants to make next. She speaks about already experimenting with larger pieces, or returning to the generous use of negative space, rather than filling every corner. Even more surprisingly, she even talks about stepping away from embroidery altogether for a while, exploring printmaking and lino cuts before inevitably finding her way back again. Yet, it dawns on me - this should surprise me at all; it's very much part of the process and part of her artistic preservation.
On the subject of the future, I ask Holly if she has any upcoming shows and what her ideal exhibition would look like. Rather than talking about where it would be held or who might attend, she immediately begins describing the experience she wants to create.
"I'd love to do a show with loads of my pieces," she tells me. "I want people to be immersed in them.”
She imagines large, tapestry-like works hanging throughout the space, or walls completely covered in smaller embroideries, allowing visitors to move amongst them. As she describes it, I realise that, in many ways, she is describing the very studio we are already standing in. It feels less like an exhibition and more like an invitation into the way her mind works; layered, colourful and a little chaotic, but in a fantastic way.
The boldest idea, however, concerns the embroideries themselves.
On several occasions, Holly has discovered that collectors have accidentally hung her work back to front. Once, the thought horrified her. She worried people would see the pencil marks, loose threads and occasional traces of glue that were never intended to be visible. Now, she finds herself drawn to exactly that idea.
"I'd love to... show both sides," she tells me. "It shows the process."
The reverse of an embroidery is no longer something to hide. It reveals the journey; every decision, correction and moment of uncertainty that brought the finished image into existence. Rather than seeing those imperfections as flaws, Holly has begun to recognise them as part of the work itself. She has learnt that the process is the thing to fall in love with. The studio, the freedom and the life she has built around her work are not the reward for making art, but what naturally occurs when the desire to make never fades. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is worth exhibiting.