Warm, magnetic and endlessly curious, Brooke Holiday has a way of making people feel instantly inspired and engaged. An art teacher, artist, Pilates instructor, cook, host and one half of Loosends Life Drawing, her life in Naarm, Melbourne is a constant act of making, teaching and bringing people together.
We joined Brooke at home, where she cooks, paints, hosts and styles with the same instinctive ease. Over an afternoon of her favourite dishes, drinks and conversation, we captured her in the place she feels most herself.
At the heart of it all is an appetite for creativity. There was no single moment when Brooke decided it would become her life. Rather, she describes creativity as something she needs to stay connected to herself.
“Creativity is definitely a channel to me - a way of processing emotions and better understanding the world and my experience in it.”
THERE’S ONE RULE: COME HUNGRY.
If creativity is at the heart of Brooke’s world, the kitchen is where it becomes most communal.
“I love to cook, love to eat,” she says. “Sharing food and cooking for the people in my life is totally my love language.”
At Brooke’s house, food is about more than feeding people. It’s a way of connecting, creating and caring. She thinks of the dining table as a place for conversation and exchange, where a meal can become its own kind of collaboration.
Her relationship with food hasn’t always been this simple. After working to repair her relationship with food in her early twenties, Brooke now sees it through a different lens: pleasure, fuel, creativity, devotion and appreciation.
That gratitude extends to the act of sharing it.
Her approach to cooking is as intuitive as her approach to art. Recipes are starting points, techniques are learned by doing, and the fridge is often the final source of inspiration. Butter, capers, herbs, anchovies, honey, mustard, vinegar, shallots: the toolkit of someone who can turn almost anything into dinner.
“You will not leave my kitchen hungry, and if you snack before I make you dinner, it will probably hurt my feelings lol.”
Consider yourself warned.
LEARNING TO PLAY AGAIN
That same instinct to stay curious follows Brooke into the classroom, where teaching primary art has become an extension of her own creative practice.
Her students approach making without worrying about what’s “good” or conventionally tasteful. They simply make. Watching that freedom has reminded Brooke of something adults often lose along the way.
“That freedom can escape us as adults, so teaching reminds me of the importance of play, both in my practice and in life.”
The trade-off is energy. After a full day at school, there’s often little left for her own work, so she has learned not to force it. Instead, ideas are allowed to slowly crystallise before she dives into making during the school holidays.
It’s a rhythm that runs through much of Brooke’s life: less forcing, more listening.
MAKING IT VISIBLE
That trust in instinct is at the centre of Brooke’s painting practice, too.
Much of her research explores the subconscious, limiting beliefs and the old patterns that shape how we experience the world. She approaches painting almost therapeutically, using the process to move beyond the conscious mind and express things she might not yet have words for.
“I’m really trying to treat making as a practice of expression rather than something to optimise or control.”
Lately, that process has brought something unexpected into her work. Feelings and experiences she had been carrying internally have started to take physical form on the canvas, with her paintings becoming more figurative without her consciously deciding they should.
For Brooke, seeing something internal become tangible has felt like a release. “In a way, the physicality validates the experience.” It’s another version of the same idea: make space, let go of the outcome, and see what emerges.
A SIXTH SENSE
That desire for play, freedom and connection also led Brooke to Loosends, the fortnightly life drawing class she co-hosts with artist Christopher Myles at Hotel House in Fitzroy North.
Originally Chris’s project, Loosends gave Brooke something she had been craving in her own practice: a regular space to experiment, fuck it up and reconnect with the freedom of making without expectation.
The community has grown into something bigger, too. A diverse, expansive room for people to exchange ideas, perspectives and ways of seeing.
“A sixth sense is satisfied,” Brooke says of what happens when people create together without pressure.
For her, that kind of connection feels increasingly important. In a world built around speed and productivity, these offline spaces offer something simpler: a chance to drop your guard, be present and remember what it feels like to be fully immersed in something.
Perhaps that’s what connects all of Brooke’s worlds. The classroom, the kitchen, the studio, the life drawing room. They’re all spaces where people are invited to stop performing and start participating.
To make something. Share something. Get it wrong. Try again. And maybe, somewhere in the process, play again.
ON REPEAT
So what is feeding Brooke’s curiosity right now? Her references are as eclectic as her practice, moving between philosophy, poetry, food, film and the invisible worlds that sit beneath everyday life.
Favourite home scent: Fazeek Kakadu Plum + Bush Cucumber
A fresh, fruity and herbaceous blend with fir needle, orange, blood plum, cucumber, vanilla and amber.
John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty
A meditation by the late Irish poet, theologian and philosopher on the invisible world, and beauty as a human calling.
Gabi Abrão, Practices of Apparition
Short stories and poems moving between the digital world, earth and beyond, described as an offering to ghosts, Gods and the vessels through which they long to be seen.
Le Ricette del Convento
An Italian cooking show in which three Benedictine monks prepare traditional monastic and local recipes using fresh, seasonal and historic ingredients.
C. W. Leadbeater & Annie Besant, Thought-Forms
A strange and fascinating exploration of the idea that thoughts, moods and music might have their own visual language.
Kathleen Collins, Losing Ground (1982)
A film about a philosophy professor searching for an “ecstatic experience” somewhere between logic, sensuality and creative freedom. Made in 1982 and only fully released in 2015, it was written and directed by Kathleen Collins, widely regarded as the first Black woman to write and direct a narrative feature film in the US.
Brooke’s influences make sense in context. They’re all interested, in one way or another, in what happens beneath the surface: feeling, ritual, perception, beauty, instinct and the strange things that become possible when we stop trying to control every outcome.
For someone whose life revolves around making, perhaps the most important thing Brooke is making room for is not the work itself, but everything that can happen when we slow down enough to notice.
SHOP BROOKE HOLIDAY'S FAVOURITE FAZEEK PIECES
_______
Brooke Holiday - @brooke_holiday_
Loosends Life Drawing - @looseends_lifedrawing
Images - Philippa Musso
Sip + Tell with Brooke Holiday
Warm, magnetic and endlessly curious, Brooke Holiday has a way of making people feel instantly inspired and engaged. An art teacher, artist, Pilates instructor, cook, host and one half of Loosends Life Drawing, her life in Naarm, Melbourne is a constant act of making, teaching and bringing people together.
We joined Brooke at home, where she cooks, paints, hosts and styles with the same instinctive ease. Over an afternoon of her favourite dishes, drinks and conversation, we captured her in the place she feels most herself.
At the heart of it all is an appetite for creativity. There was no single moment when Brooke decided it would become her life. Rather, she describes creativity as something she needs to stay connected to herself.
THERE’S ONE RULE: COME HUNGRY.
If creativity is at the heart of Brooke’s world, the kitchen is where it becomes most communal.
At Brooke’s house, food is about more than feeding people. It’s a way of connecting, creating and caring. She thinks of the dining table as a place for conversation and exchange, where a meal can become its own kind of collaboration.
Her relationship with food hasn’t always been this simple. After working to repair her relationship with food in her early twenties, Brooke now sees it through a different lens: pleasure, fuel, creativity, devotion and appreciation.
That gratitude extends to the act of sharing it.
Her approach to cooking is as intuitive as her approach to art. Recipes are starting points, techniques are learned by doing, and the fridge is often the final source of inspiration. Butter, capers, herbs, anchovies, honey, mustard, vinegar, shallots: the toolkit of someone who can turn almost anything into dinner.
Consider yourself warned.
LEARNING TO PLAY AGAIN
That same instinct to stay curious follows Brooke into the classroom, where teaching primary art has become an extension of her own creative practice.
Her students approach making without worrying about what’s “good” or conventionally tasteful. They simply make. Watching that freedom has reminded Brooke of something adults often lose along the way.
The trade-off is energy. After a full day at school, there’s often little left for her own work, so she has learned not to force it. Instead, ideas are allowed to slowly crystallise before she dives into making during the school holidays.
It’s a rhythm that runs through much of Brooke’s life: less forcing, more listening.
MAKING IT VISIBLE
That trust in instinct is at the centre of Brooke’s painting practice, too.
Much of her research explores the subconscious, limiting beliefs and the old patterns that shape how we experience the world. She approaches painting almost therapeutically, using the process to move beyond the conscious mind and express things she might not yet have words for.
Lately, that process has brought something unexpected into her work. Feelings and experiences she had been carrying internally have started to take physical form on the canvas, with her paintings becoming more figurative without her consciously deciding they should.
For Brooke, seeing something internal become tangible has felt like a release. “In a way, the physicality validates the experience.” It’s another version of the same idea: make space, let go of the outcome, and see what emerges.
A SIXTH SENSE
That desire for play, freedom and connection also led Brooke to Loosends, the fortnightly life drawing class she co-hosts with artist Christopher Myles at Hotel House in Fitzroy North.
Originally Chris’s project, Loosends gave Brooke something she had been craving in her own practice: a regular space to experiment, fuck it up and reconnect with the freedom of making without expectation.
The community has grown into something bigger, too. A diverse, expansive room for people to exchange ideas, perspectives and ways of seeing.
“A sixth sense is satisfied,” Brooke says of what happens when people create together without pressure.
For her, that kind of connection feels increasingly important. In a world built around speed and productivity, these offline spaces offer something simpler: a chance to drop your guard, be present and remember what it feels like to be fully immersed in something.
Perhaps that’s what connects all of Brooke’s worlds. The classroom, the kitchen, the studio, the life drawing room. They’re all spaces where people are invited to stop performing and start participating.
To make something. Share something. Get it wrong. Try again. And maybe, somewhere in the process, play again.
ON REPEAT
So what is feeding Brooke’s curiosity right now? Her references are as eclectic as her practice, moving between philosophy, poetry, food, film and the invisible worlds that sit beneath everyday life.
Favourite home scent: Fazeek Kakadu Plum + Bush Cucumber
A fresh, fruity and herbaceous blend with fir needle, orange, blood plum, cucumber, vanilla and amber.
John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty
A meditation by the late Irish poet, theologian and philosopher on the invisible world, and beauty as a human calling.
Gabi Abrão, Practices of Apparition
Short stories and poems moving between the digital world, earth and beyond, described as an offering to ghosts, Gods and the vessels through which they long to be seen.
Le Ricette del Convento
An Italian cooking show in which three Benedictine monks prepare traditional monastic and local recipes using fresh, seasonal and historic ingredients.
C. W. Leadbeater & Annie Besant, Thought-Forms
A strange and fascinating exploration of the idea that thoughts, moods and music might have their own visual language.
Kathleen Collins, Losing Ground (1982)
A film about a philosophy professor searching for an “ecstatic experience” somewhere between logic, sensuality and creative freedom. Made in 1982 and only fully released in 2015, it was written and directed by Kathleen Collins, widely regarded as the first Black woman to write and direct a narrative feature film in the US.
Brooke’s influences make sense in context. They’re all interested, in one way or another, in what happens beneath the surface: feeling, ritual, perception, beauty, instinct and the strange things that become possible when we stop trying to control every outcome.
For someone whose life revolves around making, perhaps the most important thing Brooke is making room for is not the work itself, but everything that can happen when we slow down enough to notice.
SHOP BROOKE HOLIDAY'S FAVOURITE FAZEEK PIECES
_______
Brooke Holiday - @brooke_holiday_
Loosends Life Drawing - @looseends_lifedrawing
Images - Philippa Musso