This sculptor in Mordecai embraces and expands dualities using familiar feminine shapes, letting the viewer decide what they mean.  
by Colony Little | photography by Joshua Steadman

Holly Fischer creates sculptures that are alluring and confounding — celebrations of beauty that challenge aesthetic norms. They delight in their duality. Under her hands, white clay is shaped into smooth, curved forms that contain unexpected twists, like an accent of red glaze or spiny texture. They attract the viewer like insects lured into a Venus flytrap: beguiling yet deadly. “Carnivorous plants have become a metaphor in my work over the last 10 years,” she says. “They seduce through beauty and devour their prey. They’re femme fatales.”

Combining familiar feminine shapes with abstraction, Fischer articulates ideas that lie beyond the constraints of a figurative sculpture. Thighs tumble into waves and clavicles give way to amorphous spirals and scrolls. “I love ambiguity,” says Fischer. “I don’t want to tell anybody what it means. I just want to create enough space for them to read it.” Within that space, Fischer interrogates the viewer’s own relationship with the female form; her works are sculptural Rorschach tests, eliciting feelings of attraction, repulsion or fear that reveal their own comfort with the body. 

When Fischer was a teenager growing up in Boone, she turned to painting as a catharsis when she was struggling with body image, insecurity and dysmorphia. “I used art fairly early as a way to process some of those things I wasn’t comfortable verbalizing,” she says. “I visually worked through my issues with being in a female body and the trauma of puberty and adolescence.” By her senior year of high school, art became a reliable form of therapy. “I chose self-portraiture, creating a series of 20 portraits that I put those anxieties into, distorting them,” she says. “Some of them are surrealistic; there’s morphing and odd color palettes, and I started to realize that an artist can use art as a journal.” 

Fischer attended Meredith College, where she discovered a love for ceramics, and in clay she found even more freedom to express her relationship with her own body. She began hand-coiling forms, rolling the clay into snakelike tubes that she would layer on top of one another to sculpt feminine shapes while preserving rough texture and indentations. The material and process continued to guide her journey into self-discovery and acceptance in a new way by creating vessels that she could pour her insecurities into.

 

In her Mordecai home, which doubles as a studio and gallery space, an early figurative work rests on the floor. Seated in a yoga pose called Gomukhasana (Fischer is also a yoga instructor in the area), two legs are crossed and folded together with knees stacked on one another. The pose is both protective and embracing, conjuring feelings of vulnerability and self-acceptance. The tawny tones of the piece highlight the laminations in the intricately coiled clay, a texture that suggests the crepey, weathered skin caused by aging or rapid weight loss. 

As I examined the imperfections on the surface, I found myself projecting my own struggles with aging onto it. I learned that this was an example of the type of reaction Fischer seeks to elicit. “Working with clay created an opening that enabled me to start talking and sharing with others,” she says. “I realize other people around me can empathize in some way and are also getting something from this, even if their read of it is different from mine.”

After graduating from Meredith in 1999, Fischer headed to Austin to earn her MFA at the University of Texas, where she deepened her practice by attaching feminist theory to her work. Her influences include Judith Butler, whose scholarship interrogates and rejects notions of the binary; Susan Bordo, who examines how culture influences women’s relationships with their bodies; and Laura Mulvey, who popularized the idea of the “male gaze” in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. “I love the way Mulvey writes,” says Fischer. “She’s challenging what that viewership means, and as somebody who creates artwork dealing with the gaze as a sculptor, there is an inherent objectification. What is the male gaze and what does it mean to be a female having viewership?” These theorists added a layer of context about agency and bodily autonomy that supports Fischer’s work. 

While in Texas, Fischer started scaling her sculptures larger, using a low-fire white clay, smoothing out the rough textures created earlier through coiling and molding. This new surface became a foil for the contrasting elements that she adds to her sculptures, like colorful spiky thorns, round beads of clay, dots or sinewy threads of red yarn that she intricately weaves through her fragile works. From one angle, a piece will reveal shapely bodily contours, but when viewed from another it takes on an entirely new form and feeling. 

These juxtapositions between hard and soft elements further signify the dualities within her work. “Through feminist theory and understanding the male gaze, I’m trying to figure out how to create an object that is female and vulnerable to a voyeuristic gaze, yet give it enough presence that it can push back and control the way it’s perceived,” Fischer says. Scale also played a role in this body of work: “Making them so much larger takes them out of being diminutive objects. They have a presence.” 

While in Texas, Fischer made another discovery — her love of teaching. At UT, she served as a teaching assistant and adjunct instructor in two-dimensional and three-dimensional design and ceramics. In 2007, she moved back to Raleigh and soon began teaching at her alma mater, Meredith College, where she is currently a faculty member in the art department teaching ceramics, sculpture, figure drawing, and gender and image courses. 

Through her teaching, Fischer recreates the safe spaces she found as a student herself, helping her own students develop narratives in their work that challenge perceptions and encourage growth. She also created a mentorship and emerging artist-in-residency program that provides space for graduates to build their portfolios, hone skills and prepare for professional careers in art. It’s work that is both fulfilling and complementary to her own artistic practice. “I’m surrounded by these really bright students who are coming of age and discovering themselves,” Fischer says. “We spend a tremendous amount of time talking about concepts, personal meaning and finding your voice. If I’m helping them do that, I can’t help but also help myself at the same time.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.