Lilia Orlova-Holmes rejects the consciousness of expression, the self-aware beautifying of a base phenomenon of nature. There can be no thought of prettiness, of creating an object tuned towards sensibility. There can only be expression’s own desperate grasp outwards. Expression itself has no care for what it expresses or who it expresses to. It is only the fact of self-transcendence: the tendency of being to go beyond itself. It becomes deeper, thicker, a growing mass of tendrils and vines. Lilia Orlova-Holmes’ waterlilies reject anything other than the fact of expression as it is embodied in nature: flaring up from dark roots whose origins are obscure. The tone is colossal, a swarm of purple intensities and evergreen surfaces. There can be no implication of a movement beyond. Focus cannot divert itself to the horizon. Instead, it is drawn ever deeper into life’s indiscernible act
Waterlilies lay on their bed, suspended, eukaryotes sprung from the semiotic flood, sheer signification emerging from the undifferentiated void, being’s hidden aspect. Bloody hints and turmeric protrusions remind us of depth, behind all expression there is the obscure realm of intention from which it springs. Dark tendrils lead us down to that wound, hitherto only suggested, or annihilated by being revealed. Lilia instead chooses to preserve this holy scar: the internal polarity of enmeshed and crushed up roots, by a bare suture connected to the external protrusion, the desperate reach out from the surface, grasping to be seen, to capture whatever can be drawn deeper in.