For this episode of Finding My User Manual, I sat down with Holly Rose Stones, a UK-based self-portrait artist and photographer best known for her signature blend of photography, set design and deeply personal storytelling. Since the age of 14, self-portraiture has been her way of understanding herself, a visual language that has grown into both her creative practice and her profession. Known for building her own immersive sets by hand, Holly steps into each carefully constructed world to explore identity, vulnerability, healing and the emotional complexity of being human.

I first came across Holly before I met her in person; I was introduced to her colour project via an online Adobe campaign and instantly connected with her work. When we finally met at Adobe MAX London last year the connection was instant – and since then our friendship has been a wonderful collection of deep and meaningful conversations, so of course I HAD to invite Holly onto the podcast.

During our conversation, Holly discusses how she has turned the act of creating into a way of processing and making sense of being alive.

Here’s what she shared.

Protect Your Whimsy

When asked what would be on page one of her user manual, Holly Rose Stones had a whole list of mantras ready. She says these daily, when she’s going through her practice and creating, even when getting up in the morning.

The main one that stands out is “trust yourself”. She went a long time seeking another voice, trying to validate herself through other people, and found over time that trusting herself was what mattered most. Go with your gut instinct. Trust your voice.

But the one she loves most? “Protect your whimsy.”

Her granddad was always a big creative influence, and he taught her about protecting the whimsy of creating, whatever age you are. “It’s fine to explore and experiment.”

And if all else fails?

We Live On A Floating Rock

Holly Rose Stones goes through her work quite vulnerably, and sometimes she needs to bring herself back down. “We’re living on a floating rock, so it’s fine. Just get over yourself.” She has all her mantras because she has feelings and she’s human, but sometimes when she’s getting too nervous or excited, that one grounds her.

Turning The Camera On Herself

During her GCSEs, Holly wanted to paint people and loved the idea of faces, but she was always scared to ask people to be models or portraits. So she turned the camera on herself and created from within. There were a lot of paintings of herself, and even at the time she remembers thinking “Why am I painting myself?” She couldn’t quite make sense of why she was doing it.

At university, she was quite a recluse, and remembers one day where she’d done 14 hours on Photoshop, learning it. She was in her uni room learning Photoshop, thinking, “How can I quickly get a subject that I can edit and create from?” So she photographed herself.

“I realised I was doing it when I was sad. So I was like, okay… It made me feel a little bit better.” She ended up doing her dissertation on self-portraiture as therapy.

Be Honest

Holly Rose Stones started a YouTube channel in 2015, documenting her progress and how she got from A to B with her ideas, and she was so vulnerable about it.

“One of my mantras is be honest. Every time when I post on YouTube, I’d always say to myself, no, just be honest with it. It’s fine. It’s okay.”

A lot of people bought into that because it was relatable. They bought into the journey of self-portraiture and the honesty of it all.

From Dark To Colour

Holly Rose Stones is known now for her set building and use of colour, but it wasn’t always that way. “It’s actually quite the opposite.”

If you scroll back, the early work is quite desaturated, quite dark themes. She was going through her 20s with a lot of time on her own, time in her head. “I think I was never diagnosed with depression, but I felt very low. So the only way to keep myself going every week was like, right, I’ve got this portrait to do.”

When she reflects on it, Holly says,  “It’s amazing to see the documentation of how I felt. I could feel every emotion from each picture.”

The Green Room

The colour came when Holly and her partner Jack relocated during the pandemic, back to where her parents live. Her granddad let her have his old workshop, and she renovated it into a studio.

The first colour project (the green one for anyone who has seen Holly’s work) came from an idea she’d had five years earlier. She went to a yoga workshop where they had to breathe for a few minutes, then imagine the room drenched in a colour. “All of a sudden, the room was drenched green, everywhere. I had my eyes closed still, but I looked down and the chair was green. It was the weirdest thing.”

Five years later, when she needed to do a set, she knew it had to be a green room. The candles green, the table green, the chair green, and the textured backdrop came within the process. Then she did another one, and another one.

The Leotard

For the green project, Holly wore a long-sleeve leotard. She wanted to experiment with being full length in an image, and she wanted to expose her body in a more comfortable way, but still a way she hadn’t done before.

“There was a lot of things that I went through in my 20s of weight gain, weight loss, and I got to the point where I was like, I’m sick of feeling like this.”

In 2020, there was a big rise of empowerment, and that enabled her to feel like she could put herself out there.

The Red Project

The first time I met Holly in person, we sat down just before Adobe Max, and we spoke at length for so long that I think we forgot anyone else was in the room. The red project was the main topic of that night, and I remember her saying to me, “I am stuck.”

From 2020 to now, Holly has gone through a lot of medical discoveries. She’s got an underactive thyroid, which is a hereditary genetic condition, which she says “really hit me massively”. It came with a lot of symptoms in her case, of which she says, “I’d put on quite a lot of weight at that point as well.” Her dad had been diagnosed with cancer about two and a half years ago, which Holly says “Obviously shattered my world.”

The first year before Adobe Max, she was going on a journey of discovering herself again, a bit of health and fitness, and focusing on herself. But when it came to the red project, she couldn’t put herself into it yet.

“I was going through a lot of learning about myself and unlearning about myself. I tried to put it into an image, and then I was like, I can’t. I can’t do it yet. I’ve not unlearned these habits that I’ve got.”

The wait was about being in a place where she had unlearned things to turn up authentically in that image. “I couldn’t put myself into it authentically. Even though I knew that’s what I wanted it to be.”

Evolving Through The Project Openly

With the red project, Holly decided to evolve through the project openly. She documented the whole process. It was amazing to watch, and see inside the mind of the artist, the intention and the minutia of decisions. Her brain evolved, her thoughts and emotions changed. People were getting involved with questions like “Is it going to be matte or glossy?” and Holly said, “Things like that excited me”.

“I think I had to rewire the way that I’d been creating before and just go, actually, this is how I’m doing it.”

The red project took two years and was finalised at the right time. “It really did. I felt like it was finalised because I did it obviously this year.”

Sharing In Real Time

How much of that journey did she share in real time? Sometimes it was literally within the hour that she’d filmed what she wanted to say online.

“I had concepts of videos in my mind as I was creating. What conversation can I start? What’s the interesting part about this that I’m doing today?”

Some days she’d do two videos a day, or one every day. With her mantra of being honest, she had to film, edit, and upload right away. “There, done, uploaded. Next, what’s tomorrow?”

Creativity and AI

The red balls in the red image are so perfectly round, perfectly formed, and have the greatest texture. I wouldn’t have believed they were real unless I’d seen the behind-the-scenes of them existing.

Holly uses AI in her artwork and is an advocate for it, but her work is always deeply rooted in physical presence . “I need to create from scratch. It just feels, I need something. I need real.”

Trust Yourself

For anyone on a similar journey, Holly’s advice is this: trust yourself. “I don’t think anyone’s path is the same. It will never be the same because of all different stages, different situations in our lives.”

She looked at the two of us. Same university, same building, both studied, both had a love for photography. She went self-portrait, I went the other way. We had exactly the same opportunities. “So I think it is just trust yourself and go with your gut of the way that you want to go.”

Design Your Life

Holly also recommends being a freelance photographer on the side. She created a living off weddings and designed her life so that throughout the summer she was shooting weddings, and throughout the winter she created self-portraits and made props for six months.

“I’d gained enough income, financial stability, and then I could do what I wanted for six months.”

A lot of her wedding clients found her through the self-portraiture online. They connect because of that authentic side of her. “At first I was embarrassed about that though”, but now the two sides of her work support each other.

Connect With People

One thing Holly would say is to connect with people. “Getting yourself around actually really helps with inspiration.”

Show up, be present. The conversations at that table at Adobe Max she says, she will “take through life with me”.

 

Listen to the full episode:

Connect with Holly Rose Stones

Website: hollyrosestones.com

Instagram: @hollyrosestones

Tiktok: @hollyrosestones

Youtube: @hollyrosestones