Biography

Patti Gaal-Holmes is an artist/filmmaker and historian who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to German and Hungarian immigrants. She lived/travelled in various countries before settling in the UK and studying for a BA (Hons) Visual Art and an AHRB-funded MA in Painting at Winchester School of Art. In 2006 she took up an AHRC-funded research scholarship in film at the University of Portsmouth, resulting in the publication of A History of 1970s British Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). Gaal-Holmes’ cross-disciplinary practice includes working with film (celluloid and digital), photography, drawing, artists’ bookmaking and writing. She has a particular love of working with analogue photo/film processes whereby the alchemy of the darkroom and hands-on approaches to working inform relationships between content and film materiality. Questions related to the meaning of ‘home', identity and exile underpin recent practice-based investigations and are informed by her cross-cultural identity, travelling/living in various countries and by discourses on migration and post/colonialism. Additionally, questions related to how we live and how we observe our living, are consistent preoccupations. In this it is the recorded evidence of existence that offers up a rich seam of material for excavation, enabling a sense of real or imaginary narration of human existence. Gaal-Holmes is a Senior Lecturer in Film Production at the Arts University Bournemouth.