Blue Shop Gallery presents
Connie Harrison
‘Knitted Hedges’
6th - 23rd April
PV Drinks 5th April 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
CONNIE HARRISON
Connie Harrison lives and works in London. She studied her BA at Chelsea College of Arts graduating in 2016 and has exhibited across London and beyond since. Blue Shop Gallery are proud to present ‘Knitted Hedges’, a predominantly South London inspired show, a celebration of the green spaces we love the most. 'Knitted Hedges' is a celebration of our very own local verdant parks and landscapes from Camberwell to Brixton, Brunswick to Brockwell. We can't wait to welcome you all next week for opening drinks at the gallery Wednesday 5th April 6-9pm.
Solo Exhibitions:
‘Nurtured Furrows’, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, 2022
London Art Fair, 2022
Selected Group Shows:
‘Old Friends, New Friends.’ Collective Ending, London, 2021
‘Delphian Open Call’, London, 2021
’A Future Cast in Our Image’ Grove Collective, London, 2021
‘Small is Beautiful’ Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, 2020
‘British Painting II’ Bermondsey Project Space, London, 2019
Chelsea College of Arts, BA (Hons) 2013-2016
KNITTED HEDGES
Through surfaces and their variations, compositions manifest slowly, through a process of layering and stripping away oil paint and wax paste. In texture, mark, opacity and colour, elements of the surface unfold, overlay and entwine, stimulating movement and depth to the work, as if they are themselves growing. Natural forms and elements float across the depth of the painting plane, in and out of familiarity. The transfer of reality is not simply reduced to form, shape and colour, but is rich in energy and atmosphere. There is an entombing of time as well as place. Paint, very deep in some places and, in others more exposed, reveals earlier iterations of the painting below: representations coagulate like memories, emulating the idea of passing and fluctuating time, the past meets the present and influences its form, setting its course. A course which promotes pause and draws out our instinctual desires to touch and to be touched. Processes of removal, erasion and carving create uncertainties that introduce space for bodily encounters. Harrisons interest lies further than a viewers visual or emotion engagement, but reaches further, teasing haptic responses.
The paintings grow organically, layer after layer, developing depositional patterns, mimicking decaying leaves and sedimentary rock: but then they are then carved into and the surface resculpted, an attempt to tame and counteract the organic process.
Whilst there are obvious references to nature, Harrison’s processes, in particular her use of colour, give the work a sense of electrical vibration. Colours hover, entombed and knitted across layers of an opaque wax paste that remind me all at once of a delicate prehistoric mosquito trapped in amber and explosions of fireworks. The paint seems to breath and float like the leaves of trees in a brisk London wind, but also gyrate and twitch like a glitching screen.
Often artists claim to work somewhere between figuration and abstraction, a way to deter us from a lack of clarity within the work. Harrison offers us a refined and mature experimentation of paint, materials and surface as well as depicting familiar locales, not placing herself somewhere on the cloudy spectrum but bravely working simultaneously at either end, in both abstraction and depiction.
Although Harrison declares that the natural world is her muse and subject, the use of familiar landscape seems not just the subject of the work but more so an architecture in which to support an intricate exploration of process and the painted surface. The manipulation of realistic space is used as a premise to explore natural, organic rhythms and cycles through paint. There is also metaphorical exploration of landscape as the paint layer itself becomes its own geography. Once again a dichotomy is formed between an impulsion to fall into the work and examine the vast miniature sculpted landscape of the paint surface, against the desire to pull back and digest the paintings as whole composed images.
Harrison’s excavatory process lends itself more to archeology than it does painting. London itself is a labyrinth of time and history. Past iterations of the city creep out from amongst each other: hidden behind glass monoliths are 15th century pubs, and behind those, Roman bricks; Georgian trees battle against towers and Victorian parks provide respite from concrete vortexes. Much like Harrison’s paintings, the city constantly vibrates and fluctuates, and at varying times, allows you to witness snippets of its history. Working sensitively to develop a composition in response to previous stages of construction, Harrison works like a historian trying to reconstruct a distant event. Each finished painting lends itself to the start of a new. One must come to an end to bring new life to the next. Much like the fossil, her works are a kind of spiral which traps time, the viewer unravels them with their engagement and in so doing they pick apart the material form and leaf through layers of history.
Harrison has become all at once painter, historian and archeologist of her own practice. She reveals that paintings are never final, dead, objective or motionless, but there is always vibrating life that oozes with urgency: urgency to be witnessed, urgency to be excavated, urgency to remain alive.
In choosing to study London’s parks and green spaces, Harrison is both documenting, and reminding us of how necessary and important green spaces have become in recent years. Their stagnancy as natural corridors and moments of respite has been dispelled as they have once again become vital social and meeting places. The documentation of our beloved parks including Brunswick Park, Folkstone Gardens, Brockwell Gardens, Kew Gardens, Ruskin Park, Hampstead Heath and Rookery Gardens provide painterly respites from the chaotic world around us, we are reminded of our outdoor spaces that have become extensions of our homes. Harrisons work provide us with a sense of safety much like Londons mazes of hedges and shrubbery provide safety and shelter to the cities wildlife. The pathways carved into Harrison’s paintings imitate the natural highways that slice through the concrete, formed by hedges and shrubbery that protect the berries, birds and beasts that take shelter within.
The body of work feels like a love letter to the green spaces that pepper south london, and the city at large. Spaces that maybe went unappreciated for many years are asking to be reconsidered and remoulded, much like Harrison’s paintings request in their engagement. It is with growing importance that as humans, we continue to constantly reassess and reinvestigate our physical world. Harrison, through combining quiet attentiveness with consistent careful work forces us to investigate with her same level of intricacy, something as simple and beautiful as a natural London landscape. We are left with a sense of responsibility to investigate our own intimate physical experiences with as much fervor as Harrison.
‘...Leaves fall to nourish roots
And behold, a New leaf upon the tree...’
– Adrian Wait
‘...to make cuttings for friends is spreading new leaves to the sun.’
- Eric Torgersen