We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lily Hollinden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lily, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I was always an art kid, even as far back as I can remember. I was the kind of child who was always in their “own world”, I often preferred to play alone and I could entertain myself for hours playing in my own imagination. You could say my first body of work was a series of monsters I drew around, I think, the age of four, covered in spikes and teeth and such, that I called “Baby Doll Destroyers” (because I didn’t like baby dolls, I found them really creepy). As I grew up, I just always loved drawing, and I enjoyed going to art camps and classes, and took private lessons later in elementary school. I loved comics when I was young, and so I wanted to draw a comic strip that could be in the paper every day like my favorite comics were (Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.). I got a little older and got extremely into the Manga/Anime world, which led into my interest in illustration as a whole. The first time I painted with oils, I was 17 and in a summer program before my senior year of high school. I entered undergrad at Indiana University to pursue my BFA in painting, and that’s where I got so invested in the “fine art” side of the art world; it provided me with an approach to art-making that surpassed purely the visual, but incorporated the conceptual so heavily. I am very fortunate that I have a family full of creatives, my dad is a musician and composer, my mom also is heavily musically involved and loves writing, so I was always supported in my artistic endeavors. I honestly never seriously considered any other profession for myself for my life, I feel like I was walking down this path from day one. There honestly has just never been anything I’ve found that even comes close to being as interesting and fulfilling to me as making art has.

Lily, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Lily Camille Hollinden, I’m a native of Bloomington, Indiana, and I’m currently pursuing my Master’s in Fine Art at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There are several different media that I’ve been interested in over the years, but above anything else I consider myself a painter, although I do dabble quite a bit in the ceramics world at this time. The work I make aims to transport my audience into a world of my own design, and to describe my unique view of the nature of life and humanity. My current body of work is focused around an alter-ego-like character named Pepper Plinkett. Pepper is a clown, a motif that serves as somewhat of a caricature for human nature. I am fascinated by the way humans fit into the animal kingdom; what traits are unique to us, and what traits we share with other species. Human kind’s capacity for humor is what, to me, stands out the most, and the concept of comedy as a social tool, especially to express authenticity through comedy, is the driving force behind a lot of my work. My paintings and sculptures observe Pepper as she experiences the world around her, a world without time. I am interested in the concept of evolution, of change, on the scale of the micro to the macro. I am heavily influenced by my own personal growth and the way I have changed throughout my life. Pepper Plinkett is an embodiment of my personal philosophies surrounding the “meaning of life”; to learn, to change, to feel, to explore, and to laugh.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

A big part of what has led me to to make the work I do today is my relationship with depression and survival. Despite the quite charmed life I’ve led and my overall cheerful nature, I have clinical depression thanks to my brain chemistry, and there have been times in my life where I have been very unhappy and even contemplated taking my own life. The lowest I have ever felt was definitely during my first year of my MFA; I had broken up with a long-term partner, moved to a new city all by myself, and really found myself struggling to make new friends and to not fall victim to imposter syndrome and chronic anxiety. I was worried about everything; do these new classmates like me? Do they think I’m stupid? Do my faculty think I’m stupid? Is the work I’m making any good? Did I say the wrong thing? Is our country about to fall into a Trump-enduced civil war? Oh God, will I get fruit flies in my apartment if I don’t eat these bananas? I tended to catastrophize. I quite literally told myself, “I’d rather die than fail at getting my MFA”, but that meant that, as my stress with school grew, so did my suicidal ideation. Things came to a breaking point when, at the end of March of 2022, I experienced a herniated disk caused by stress. After a long night in the ER, I took a good, hard look at myself and my situation. I thought a lot about survival, this natural drive in all species to live, to pass on our genes. What happens when that survival drive, the thing that fuels all of us animals, is gone? I wanted nothing more than to quit, than to pack up my apartment and run home in shame. But if I quit, then I’d have to kill myself. And I didn’t want to die, not really. So I didn’t quit.
Slowly but surely, after months upon months of therapy, upping my medication dosages, and an earnest effort to make friends and connect with people despite the anxiety and nerves, things began to look up. By the fall of 2022, I was in a much happier place, and since then I’ve been happier than I thought I was even capable of being just a few years ago. I had kind of a zen-like epiphany that, if for some reason, I dropped out of school, I would be ok. If I really wanted to, I could pack up everything I own into a truck, drive out to the coast, and live in a tent on the beach. I realized that nothing really matters, and that you can’t predict the future, and that’s not so scary at all. It’s actually a good thing. It’s liberating. I finally set down all these expectations I had for myself, all of my fears of the great unknown of the future. In this re-framing of my life and what it meant to me, I found a definition of the meaning of life for myself, which is simply to live it and experience it to the fullest. I really like the phrase, “If you can’t have a good time, at least get a good story”.
I’m a lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable now. I am in my third and final year of my degree, working towards my thesis exhibition in the spring, and having an absolute blast. The work I make is fun for me, and deeply personal as well. It aims to illustrate this lighthearted playfulness I’ve discovered in my relationship with life, even when it comes to hard times and subject matters. Now that I’ve finished my stint walking over coals for the time being, I can look back at my scarred feet with pride, and know that the next coals I cross will burn a little less.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

First and foremost, I just wish society as a whole had more of a conscious appreciation for the arts. I don’t think the average person really understands how much art makes their lives better. People enjoy music, enjoy film, enjoy video games and books and design, but then act like they’re not interested in art as a whole. None of these things that make daily life tolerable can exist without creatives. The arts also get a bad rap in some environments because some people think they’re not important, or that it’s “easy” to make art in a way that things like STEM work is not. But when you sit someone like that down with paper and a 2B pencil and tell them to draw the still-life in front of them, they start to understand. I think a lot of folks who don’t make art think that being creative or artistically talented is something you’re born with, not something you develop over years and years of practice. I don’t believe in natural talent. If you put in the time and effort, anyone can learn to do anything. Any skill is achievable, as long as you have the motivation to pursue it. I have some old friends from childhood that are currently pursing PHD’s in math and physics and psychology, and one friend who works building satellites for NASA, but they all know they couldn’t do what I do any easier than I could do what they do, and they tell me so!
Overall, I just think the general public needs to put some more respect on the arts. No more “Oh, so what do you plan on doing with that?” when someone you know tells you they’re pursuing a degree in the arts. There’s no such thing as a useless degree; I’m a firm proponent of education for the sake of education anyway.
I suppose, what I’d like to see the most, is all of the people who have never drawn a picture in their adult lives to sit down and give it another go. Let that creative little kid back out. Don’t worry how “good” the end result is. Laugh at yourself, and have fun with it. It’s refreshing.

Contact Info:

• Website: lilyhollinden.com
• Instagram: @lilyhollinden

Image Credits
Lily Hollinden