ABOUT
Rooted in the atmospheric South, Holly T Benton is a ceramic artist shaped by the quiet decay and subtle resilience of place. Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, and later spending formative time in New Orleans, she developed an eye for the ephemeral—drawn to the beauty found in crumbling facades, saltworn structures, and the haunting presence of abandonment. Working primarily with clay, Holly explores the tension between impermanence and form. Guided by a deep love of chemistry and material experimentation, her practice blends traditional techniques with contemporary simplicity, evoking the tactile, organic qualities of the Lowcountry landscape. Informed by memory, environment, and material honesty, Holly creates works that echo both fragility and endurance—quiet meditations on what remains, and what gracefully disappears.
15
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
You can put here anything decent or not, that is up to you
This is where you place everything you want people to
60
SUCCESFUL EXHIBITION
You can put here anything decent or not, that is up to you
This is where you place everything you want people to
12
FAMOUS ARTIST
You can put here anything decent or not, that is up to you
This is where you place everything you want people to
10
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
You can put here anything decent or not, that is up to you
This is where you place everything you want people to
ARTIST STATEMENT FOR ABSTRACT WORK
My work is rooted in the language of movement — a moment caught, frozen, and held in form. I explore the tension between stillness and motion, presence and absence, connection and isolation. These are anthropomorphic shapes: soft, undulating, silky forms that echo the human figure — busts, torsos, curves, cavities — distilled from complexity into elemental gestures.
I am drawn to the idea of conversation between forms. Striding figures, twisting bodies, shapes that lean toward each other or pull away — each piece holds a relationship, a dialogue, a fleeting interaction stilled in time. These are conversations between people who may never speak. Together, yet alone. Engaged, yet aloof. A crowd where no one is truly seen.
Surface matters. I use heat, fire, and burnish to create textures that beg to be touched — satin-like finishes, flashes of copper, random moments of color — unpredictable, like memory or emotion. The surface is a record of control and its loss. It is where heat meets form, where the ephemeral becomes tactile.
Through sculpture, I seek to hold onto the intangible — a gesture, a look, a presence. The curve of a back, the stride of a figure mid-step, the invisible thread between people moving through space. My forms are organic, human, and abstracted — a visual language for what it feels like to be among others and still feel alone.
These are moments, fleeting but forever.
ARTIST STATEMENT FOR HOUSE SERIES
My work explores the haunting beauty found in decaying houses—structures once vibrant with life, now surrendered to time, weather, and silence. These abandoned homes stand as poignant symbols of human loss and the ephemeral nature of our existence. Peeling paint, collapsing roofs, vines weaving through broken windows—each detail tells a story not only of neglect, but of memory, presence, and eventual erasure.
I am drawn to the moment where human creation meets natural reclamation. These spaces become frozen points in time: neither fully alive nor entirely dead. They evoke a powerful duality—once homes, symbols of shelter and safety, now transformed into places of fragility and forgotten dreams. The contrast between the intended permanence of a home and its inevitable decay speaks to the transitory nature of all things we build, believe, or leave behind.
Through this work, I invite viewers to confront the quiet force of nature—not as a violent destroyer, but as a patient, inevitable presence that softens and reshapes our built environment. These images serve as meditations on impermanence, the beauty of entropy, and the complex emotional terrain of abandonment. Ultimately, they are elegies for the spaces we lose and the lives once held within them.
