ALEXA HARRIS

My work has rawness, which is both abstracted and deconstructed. I love an unfinished edge; an unfilled area in a landscape or a headless figure. This keeps my attention at full immersion. I am excited by colour, form and playing with light. Influenced by Michelangelo's unfinished drawings to Titian's colour and Rembrandt's gestural strokes and mastery of light. Primarily, Bill Viola’s video works about life, religion and death have always inspired me. My work is multi layered, in colour, form and reference.

I may be immersed in sketching out an idea, up to my elbows in oil paint, drawing, photographing or measuring a new found object. It is always about searching for the truth. It’s the core element and energy I am always striving for in my practice. Knowing when to stop is key. Keeping a freshness and clarity is important. If it’s gone too far, I must strip it back down again and try to reveal the subject’s strength and fragility simultaneously, which is hard.

 I am fascinated by the materiality and historicity of my found objects. (Or a hoarder of old rubbish perhaps?) More than simply objects, for me these are jolts of memory filled with nostalgia and aroma that I have the privilege to revive, protect and recycle.

I am surrounded by my mysterious found objects; some suspended overhead like my Dad’s smoking pipe, or his black hat or on old casino dice, which sit in my studio, all in the need to be transformed into something that speaks to me. Finding a language for my work to come to life. Be it through painting abstracted landscapes on corrugated board, canvas or transforming one of my ‘objects’ belonging to my late Dad from his studio, into a new work. My work is a visual conversation, pushing and pulling and constantly challenging me.

I paint and make things to make sense of it all. I've always been obsessed with the three dimensionality of the line and its relationship within space. How a line divides, cuts and separates all objects but holds everything together at the same time. It’s how one perceives the world around them…anyone’s view, at any one given time. We are all individual beings trying to be a whole, trying to be in and on time. We do our best but then the music and light fades. Like a still from a film or a moment in time, it is sometimes disturbing, unsettling or simply at peace.

Alexa Harris, 2022