This exhibition explores life beyond the limits of mainstream science

Joey Holder is in the last stretches of installing her latest exhibition, Cryptid, at Leicester’s Two Queens gallery when we connect over a video call. Images of the setup flash up on the screen: a ritualistic circle of standing stones, surrounding a raised platform. Joey is pointing out where 16 green lasers will beam up out of the stage, while projections of microscopic creatures adorn the rock formations and electronic sounds flood the space, courtesy of the experimental musician AJA.

In case you’re unfamiliar, a “cryptid” is defined as a creature that may or may not exist, unrecognised by conventional or mainstream science. This might immediately conjure up infamous creatures like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, but as Holder points out, a vast percentage of very real plants and animals are yet to be labelled by science. “I kind of like the idea of there just being loads of cryptids out there,” the artist says, “these kind of undiscovered creatures”.

Using the visual language of science – from exhaustive diagrams to rhythmic data streams – the show invokes a range of these enigmatic creatures, both real and imagined. There are plankton, which are thought to contribute to a majority of the Earth’s photosynthesis, despite going largely unnoticed. Then, there’s an invasive zoophyte dreamed up by Dazed’s Günseli Yalcinkaya for another of Holder’s projects, awakened by the microplastic offcasts of modern humanity’s techno-capitalist regime. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred, queer ecology pushing up against the strict taxonomies of Western science, but that’s par for the course in the life of a cryptid at the threshold of existence.

Holder’s fascination with such creatures started at an early age. “My dad had lots of fish tanks, and kept strange creatures as pets... axolotls and newts and crabs and lobsters and fish,” she says. “What people would perceive as the uglier ones, the weirder ones, I’d always be like, ‘That’s amazing.’” Later, she’d also take up a job as a scuba diving instructor, literally immersing herself in their weightless world, which led to some interesting revelations. “One of the first things you notice when you’re diving is [that] the creatures do not give a shit that you’re there,” she adds. “It’s like you’re invisible, and I always thought [that] maybe it’s because there’s so much fucking random shit down there.”

Floating around in the deep partly inspired Holder’s three-dimensional approach to art, with the Two Queens installation representing the most extensive iteration of Cryptid to date (the show has also appeared at Paris+ par Art Basel, with another version planned for X Museum in Beijing). Her scientific interests, meanwhile, are built into the show via extensive preliminary research, which is conducted via conversations with scientists and researchers outside her particular field. Their ideas, alongside the art, music, and animations of Holder’s artistic collaborators – as well as influential internet aesthetics such as Cryptidcore – are free to go in any direction, with the aim of creating a shared and ever-changing environment. “Interdisciplinary work is the way that we’re going, more and more,” she explains. “We shouldn’t be in our own bubbles.”

There is a guiding principle that pulls Cryptid together, of course, and it’s a theme that runs throughout all of Holder’s work: “To reveal something hidden, but that is intrinsic to life on Earth and to our psyches.” In this sense, the show’s mysterious creatures – which might be lurking in the depths, but might equally be invented in our minds or, increasingly, the ‘minds’ of intelligent machines – are the perfect vessel. Either they reveal something deep about the storytelling impulse built deep into our brains, or they serve as an eerie reminder that “it’s not possible for us to imagine anything as weird as what actually exists”.

Joey Holder’s Cryptid will run at Leicester’s Two Queens until February 17, 2024