Should you review the art or the artist? With Lonnie Holley it’s hard to tell them apart, and completely impossible to separate his creativity from the mystery of being alive. When I arrive at Camden Art Centre to review his show, I find the artist making a little sculpture from bits and pieces he has found laying around outside. He starts with a drawing of a woman, then creates her portrait in copper wire, screwing up the drawing to make her hair, then finally gives her a “bow” that’s a discarded grape stem. “She heard it on the grapevine”, he jokes. Transformation, salvation, music – it’s a hypnotic demonstration of his work.
There’s more magic upstairs in a film of Holley performing his 18-minute punk-blues anthem I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, over a montage of images of his present and past. And what an extraordinary past it is. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, Holley learned the value of recycling from his grandmother, who used to take him to salvage whatever they could from the scrapyard. He compares his way of making art with the resourcefulness of Martin Luther King who, in prison in Birmingham, Alabama, for fighting its segregation laws in 1963, “wrote on toilet paper”.
