Holly Roach is a Canadian-born artist and illustrator based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Working across painting, illustration, screen printing and surface design. Her practice is characterised by a distinctive graphic sensibility, an intuitive approach to colour and an enduring fascination with the landscapes and natural forms of Aotearoa.

 

Trained in editorial and book illustration at Sheridan College in Canada and later in fabric design and print at AUT, Auckland. Holly brings the disciplines of both illustration and printmaking into her painting. Bold shapes, simplified forms, pattern and carefully balanced areas of colour remain important elements of her visual language. 

Landscape has become an increasingly significant focus of Holly’s recent practice. Drawing on journeys and remembered places across both Aotearoa and Canada, distilling the landscape into its essential forms. Roads, rivers, coastlines, trees and distant hills are reduced and reassembled through colour, rhythm and shape, creating images that sit somewhere between observation and memory.

Rather than faithfully recording a particular view, Holly is interested in the way places remain with us: how landscapes become entwined with journeys, experiences and personal stories, her own and then the viewers. Her paintings often carry a sense of stillness and familiarity while leaving space for viewers to bring their own memories to the work.

Play and experimentation are fundamental to Roach’s process. Moving freely between mediums and embracing unexpected marks and changes of direction, she creates work that is at once graphic and painterly, nostalgic and contemporary—an evolving exploration of colour, place and the imperfect nature of remembering.