Holding Still

We live in a culture that competes relentlessly for our attention. Algorithms anticipate what might keep us scrolling, feeds refresh without end, and the boundaries between one stimulus and the next grow ever thinner. In such a world, choosing to remain with something—to stop, look and simply stay there for a while—can become a surprisingly radical act.

For artist Julie Battisti, this idea has taken the form of Holding Still, a practice that treats attention not as something to be captured and consumed, but as something we can consciously give. It is a philosophy of lingering: allowing ourselves to remain with a person, an object, an image or a thought without immediately moving on.

The idea developed in Battisti’s studio in Ōtepoti Dunedin, while she was preparing for her 2025–26 solo exhibition at Parnell Gallery. Its origins were not, however, solely artistic. They were also bound up with a decision to change the pace of her life.

Battisti and her husband had left Melbourne and a demanding professional life behind, relocating to Aotearoa New Zealand in search of something more grounded and centred on family. The move created the possibility of a different rhythm. Yet she recognised that changing her surroundings did not necessarily change her own instincts. She describes herself as someone naturally inclined to hurry and to speak quickly. Her studio therefore became more than a place in which to make paintings: it became a space in which she could practise another way of being.

The idea found its most eloquent expression in flowers.

Battisti had long turned to paintings of flowers and clouds as a refuge from the noise and velocity of contemporary life. But it was through hydrangeas—perhaps one of the most familiar and easily overlooked of flowers—that the notion of Holding Still crystallised.

Rather than treating the hydrangea as a subject to be quickly observed and rendered, she stayed with it. She spent months painting a single arrangement, patiently building the image through successive layers of oil paint. Meanwhile, everything outside the canvas continued its ordinary movement. The flowers themselves faded and died. The seasons changed. Her children grew older. Life proceeded while the painting remained, in a sense, suspended in time.

That tension became the heart of the work. The physical world was constantly changing, while the canvas offered a place where attention could remain fixed.

It also gave Battisti a simple but powerful ambition: sometimes, she realised, she wanted to “hold still” and allow the world to move around her.

There is something quietly radical in that proposition. It does not require rejecting technology, withdrawing from modern life or attempting to stop time. Instead, it asks for something both smaller and perhaps more difficult: the deliberate reclaiming of one’s attention.

To hold still is to resist the assumption that everything must be immediate, consumed and replaced. It is to give an ordinary thing—such as a hydrangea—the time necessary to become extraordinary through sustained looking. And in doing so, Battisti suggests, we may discover that stillness is not an absence of activity at all, but a form of attention: active, deliberate and profoundly alive.