Anna Holm’s lived experience and most importantly, her reckoning with it, forms the foundation of her practice. Working from a small shed overlooking the garden she created (see @holm_grows ) and which plays a supportive role in her work, she develops paintings that deal with loss, memory, grief, belonging, and survival.

Her work centres on personal narratives and themes shaped by her care experience - isolation, lonliness, disenfranchised grief, and the continual state of othering that can emerge from the absence of roots, kin, and heritage. Through painting, she seeks somehow to transform these experiences into spaces of tenderness, beauty, and psychological possibility.

A recurring framework within the work is the “Ghost Self” her original identity before adoption & the “Ghost Kingdom” a psychological landscape where her ghost self lives. These are known internal coping mechanisms some care experience people use to fill the gaps of such profound loss and displacement that they endure. She describes this as “a shadow cast of characters and places where my original identity lives and trails alongside of me every single day, it is not fantasyland but a very real aspect of my daily life  - so the paintings are a way to give my ghost self a well deserved physical presence in the world”

Botanical forms appear repeatedly as metaphors for family structures, attachment, and absence. These organic, often anthropomorphic forms merge with dreamlike landscapes to create imagined environments of refuge, where her ghost self can safely exist. Through this symbolic visual language, Holm reframes experiences of abandonment and estrangement into works that hold vulnerability, resilience, and emotional transformation in tension.