Holly Rhea is a self-taught artist living and working outside Chicago, IL.

Using a variety of media, including paint, color-changing lights, textiles, vintage medical books, glitter, found statues and whatever else she can scavenge at thrift stores, Holly’s work explores questions of play, cosmology and the intersection of science and spirituality.

Her aesthetics, materials and subject matter are all reflections of a sort of “maximalism” and ecstatic, exploratory energy.

She is a metaphysical adventurer and enters into the creative process as a spiritual practice, a conversation with this week’s definition of “God”.

Each piece is revealed as a surprise when the glitter settles from her sacred, silly Whirling Dervish.

Commonly exploring themes of anatomy, consciousness, childbirth, rites of passage and the soul’s evolution with vivid and surprising colors, Holly gravitates toward Turing patterns (diffusion reaction), cellular shapes, fractals, sacred geometry, optical illusions and serotonergic hallucinations.

She is inspired by medical history, repeating patterns in nature, how the universe reflects and repeats itself, how science and spirituality conflict and confirm eachother, archetypes and frameworks of biology as a metaphor for the evolution of the soul.

Holly’s strong, oxymoronic visual style has evolved over two decades of supporting couples navigating childbirth, her own mercurial exploration of the Divine, and approaching art as an avenue of personal growth and inner-alchemy