Artist Spotlight: Chloe Holliday
Victoria-based digital artist Chloe Holliday sits down with Sugar Glider Digital to reflect on the moments, influences and technologies that have shaped her practice.
Chloe is an animation and projection artist creating calming, immersive installations from her own on-location wildlife photography. Using macro and telephoto techniques, she captures the fine textures of each environment and transforms them into slow, meditative animations. Grounded in real landscapes, her work offers a genuine sense of place and invites stillness, curiosity, and connection with the natural world.
This is part of a series of interviews with Sugar Glider Digital’s artists, where we explore artists’ practice and perspectives on digital art.
Image Credit: Chloe Holliday
Chloe Holliday, Weedy Seadragon, 2025, Digital Collage
“…deeper engagement with the natural world nurtures imagination, curiosity, and wellbeing.”
1. Were there any pivotal moments or experiences that shaped your practice?
Travelling in a van for years grounded my practice in slow, sustained immersion in the natural world. A pivotal moment was visiting Takayna (north-west Tasmania), where that relationship deepened, my collage animation evolved into immersive works built from my own photographs and sound, creating layered, sensory impressions of place. Returning there with the Bob Brown Foundation shifted my focus beyond personal observation toward sharing and evoking connection to landscapes that are both deeply significant and increasingly at risk. This ongoing connection to nature carries a childlike sense of fascination, reinforcing my belief that deeper engagement with the natural world nurtures imagination, curiosity, and wellbeing.
Nature macrophotography process
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
Macrophotography movement study of a caterpillar’s interaction with flora
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
2. What particular tools, materials, or techniques are central to your practice?
Macro, film, and telephoto photography form the foundation of my practice, allowing me to capture both intimate detail and broader environmental context within natural landscapes. I also work extensively with video, using it to study movement and inform how I animate textures in subtle, life-like ways, often drawing on parallels in natural forms such as fur, feathers, and plant structures. My process involves recording and collaging textures from the environment into animated works, and in some cases returning these works to their source locations through projection, creating a cyclical relationship between observation, construction, and return.
Creative Process for ‘Galahs’
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
3. Are there skills or techniques you’re currently working to develop?
I’m continually evolving my practice through exploring new environments and studying how we perceive and respond to natural spaces. I’m increasingly interested in biophilia and biophilic design, particularly how immersion in natural forms can influence emotional, psychological, and even developmental responses. This has led me to think more about how immersive visual environments might shape perception, wellbeing, and our everyday relationship to nature, and how this understanding can be embedded into my own work.
Chloe Holliday, Galahs, 2026, Digital Collage
Movement study for ‘Galahs’
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
“Exhibiting reinforces my intention to create immersive environments that feel alive and embodied.”
4. How does exhibiting your work affect your practice?
Seeing audiences engage with the work is a vital part of my practice, especially when they respond with curiosity, stillness, or wonder. I’m often interested in the moment when viewers realise the works are constructed from photographs rather than illustration, which shifts their sense of proximity to the natural world.
Atmospheric Whale examines light’s texture through juxtaposition with a clouded night sky
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
Atmospheric Whale exhibited upon a lighthouse emphasises light’s potential to enact itself upon a surface
Video Credit: Chloe Holliday
Exhibiting reinforces my intention to create immersive environments that feel alive and embodied, where audiences can reconnect with nature in a more immediate and sensory way. This interest is also informed by research into how exposure to natural forms can support attention, emotional regulation, and overall wellbeing, which underpins my broader approach to creating experiential work.
Chloe Holliday, Atmospheric Whale, 2025, Digital Collage
See more of Chloe’s work here: