The Gothic - a style long linked with the dark and grotesque - was fascinated by naturalism, intrinsically symbolic and laden with meaning. In this collection of works, Ġulja Holland finds refuge in the opportunity to continue in this tradition of painting and art-making. Her work attempts to invert the biblical, inviting us to paradise not as a place of Genesis, but one of a distant future which she gives us the agency to lead ourselves to. The halls of Spazju Kreattiv carry the visions that Holland has of this place, exposing a negotiation between peace, cataclysm, and anxiety about the defining parameters of our current time. Hers is an attempt at returning to a place where we see beyond solely a gaze which is human.

The works of Ġulja Holland have been assembled across four rooms through an introspective exploration of the Anthropocene, reconciling between the artist’s womanhood and her relationship with nature. With works created in London, Lisbon and Malta, she establishes a new dialogue with the world, and stages for audiences her own chaotic Garden of Earthly Delights. Through painterly techniques that are the result of various processes of digital and tactile layering, Holland fashions a new position as a figurative artist. Her saturated colour palette, translucent washes and the reliance on the x-ray reveal an unconventional perspective. She borrows from across the history of art and several sources of biological imagery in order to communicate a new way of seeing, in what is becoming a distinctive method within her practice.

As Holland sets us up to enter a world of accelerated destruction, chaos and calamity, she seeks to provide ammunition for beauty, justice and a newfound harmony in another. Holland’s paintings aim for an urgent rethinking of the power struggles within the natural world. In removing the clothes, furs, veils and skins from her subjects she manages to reveal what is common, rather than what segregates. The monstrous and barbaric, terms used to explain the gothic, are here stripped of their negative connotation, in favour of a shared, altogether alternative, and prosperous future.