Laurel Holmes’s work seeks to distill the essence of place, capturing not only what she sees but how she feels in relation to her natural environment. Living by the sea, she is acutely aware of the tension between the serene and the overwhelming, the familiar and the mysterious. Her practice reflects a longing for spaces of retreat in a world increasingly dominated by noise, artificial light, and hard surfaces—where the disappearance of wild nature distances us from its profound restorative power.

Influenced by memories of an unbounded childhood in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, her work carries a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for an unfiltered connection to nature. The landscapes she frequents daily have sharpened her awareness of the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime. Once seen as an emblem of orderly perfection, nature was later understood by the Romantics as something vast, unknowable, and untamed—resisting human imposition. In this surrender to nature’s wildness, the sublime offers a path to spiritual awareness, what Wordsworth described as "intimations of immortality."

Holmes explores this tension in her work, depicting what lies beyond the visible, at the threshold between the material and the intangible. She draws on the Celtic concept of "thin places"—where the veil between the physical and spiritual becomes permeable—to evoke nature’s transformative power. In these liminal spaces, alternate possibilities emerge, reminding us of the profound healing presence of the natural world.