LIVE THE DREAM

The Harris Museum, Preston for Lancashire Encounters Festival 

In 1989 ravers with speaker stacks, hypnotic musical beats and Ecstasy, transform abandoned mill spaces into a Second Summer of Love.

In Thatcherite Britain, as mills and mines were closed; out of an air thick with a political, smog and a lack of hope, emerged evenings of euphoric, ecstatic revellery. Repetitive electronic music replaced the endless clicks and clacks of the mills machinery.  Once the home to industrious and lucrative producers and the busy hands of mill workers; these vast empty spaces were filled with thousands of young people gathering to dance.  Ecstasy brought rivals together, and a cat and mouse game with Blackburn’s police, bonded Ravers together as they stepped into a new consciousness in mass unions. Archetypal objects of commemoration, and the detritus of abandoned industry, are used in Holman’s work, as stained glass, silk banners, white label vinyl records, industrial signs, lights and windows; all preserve the stories of Acid House and the Summer of Love, and continue the unexpected stories of poets, painters and filmmakers who came before.