Close-up of a person smiling with their hand resting against their face. The image focuses on their mouth, showing clean, white teeth, and part of their nose and chin which is covered in stubble. The lighting appears dim.

In House: Ain Bailey and Holly Graham

In House: Ain Bailey and Holly Graham is the third in our series of duo exhibitions organised by and for Studio Voltaire’s onsite community of studio artists.

This exhibition presents two works: Holly Graham's three-channel video Petname, 2014 and Ain Bailey's sculpture Din/Resonance In Blue, 2019. Both works delve into the artists' Jamaican familial heritage, contemplating the sonic memories that permeate and define diasporic kinships. Complementing these works is a new collaborative piece, a wallpaper that references a design found in Holly Graham's grandmother's house.

Petname probes the tradition of pet names within Caribbean families. More familiar than the given names, these nicknames signify intimate familial relationships and reflect the structure of the family unit. Through interviews with Graham’s relatives, the film captures conversations rich with intimate migrant narratives. Encapsulating histories of diaspora movement, these nicknames act as indices of broader cultural histories of social positioning and migration.

Din/Resonance In Blue is a sculpture that evokes sonic memories associated with bereavement. The work features a triptych of Bailey’s mother’s passport photos, overlaid with the lyrics of Amazing Grace—a common hymn in Caribbean funeral traditions written by John Newton, an English slave trader turned abolitionist. The trio of passport photos, typically part of a quartet, was found incomplete among Bailey’s mother’s belongings, underscoring an intimacy that escapes formal inquiries.

Exploring cultural memory and familial bonds, Graham’s talking heads and Bailey’s close-up portraits of her mother resonate with the continuities and dissonances that define the diasporic experience. Both works embody the interplay of personal and collective memory, gripping against the velocity of forgetting.

Ain Bailey
Din/Resonance In Blue, 2019
UV print on perspex
244 cm × 58.9 cm

Holly Graham
Petname, 2014
Three-channel video (colour, sound)
12min 17sec

Ain Bailey and Holly Graham
Wallpaper, 2024

Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include The Range (2019), Eastside Projects, Birmingham; RE:Respite (2019), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, and And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love (2019), a solo exhibition at Cubitt Gallery, London.
In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled Remember To Exhale for Studio Voltaire..
Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition Version, and composed Atlantic Railton for the Listening To The City sound installation programme for the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. In 2022, Bailey created the moving image/sound work Untitled: Our Wedding for the Black Melancholia exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA and Trioesque for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany. Bailey’s most recent commission was for FACT Liverpool’s Resolution Research Project, for which she created the installation Four (2024).
Bailey was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, the 2023 recipient of Awards For Artists from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and was shortlisted, together with Camden Arts Centre, for the Freelands Foundation Award.
She has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Camden Arts Centre in 2026.
ainbailey.com
Holly Graham is a London-based artist whose work looks at ways in which memory and narrative shape collective histories. Bound up in this lies an interest in recording-mechanisms, documents, evidence, and processes of editing; concerns rooted around a commitment to responsible story-telling and amplifying quiet histories. The work she makes is heavily research-driven and is often specific to particular sites and localised contexts. Working across audio, text, still and moving image, and sculptural forms, the work often employs motifs inherent to the medium of print – duplication, traces, material degradation – mirroring formal qualities often present within attempts to pin down or fix resistant and amorphous narratives.
Holly Graham holds a BFA from Oxford University and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art. Current projects include commissions with UP Projects & Barnet Council (2024); TACO! (2021-24); and Manchester Art Gallery (2024). Recent solo projects include commissions with: Locales, Rome (2023); Deptford X (2023), London; Skelf, Online (2022); Robert Young Antiques, London (2021); Gaada, Shetland (2020); Goldsmiths CCA, Online (2020); and Southwark Park Galleries, London (2020). Holly is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London. She was awarded a Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School in Rome in 2023.
hollygraham.co.uk
Holly Graham, Petname, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
Ain Bailey, Mrs Bailey (photobooth partial), date unknown. Image courtesy of the artist.

In House: Ain Bailey and Holly Graham

In House: Juliette Ezaoui and Ana Milenkovic

In House: Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid