Icon of Aurora

'Icon of Aurora' is part of a series of paintings made during lockdown, which are based on observational drawings Harriet made during live gigs in the run up to the pandemic. She says "pub culture was already suffering before Covid, and I worry it may not bounce back. In our increasingly digital age, for me, being in the local boozer, listening to live music feels close to a dying part of British culture which I want to cling onto. The layering of murky oil paint over luminous spray paint enacts the process of memory and its ability to create distance between, and idealize reality. I wanted to give both a glimpse of nostalgia for the shared social spaces we are currently lacking, whilst also acknowledging their propensity for darkness.

In a strange way, I feel lockdown has made my work feel a bit relevant to contemporary times! It certainly helped crystallise certain themes for me. My work has always been about memory, psychological landscapes which conjure different worlds that have an element of escapism to them. Suddenly I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t go out into the real world and gather any new material, so all I had to paint from was memory, imagination and sketches from past experiences, and places which I found myself romanticising because I couldn’t go there. I had to abandon the larger paintings in my art school studio, and found myself working on a much smaller scale. I wanted my paintings to feel like objects, tiny jewels, glimpses of memories which could be treasured in the way that religious icon paintings might have been.

Lockdown has made me think even more about how destructive we are as a species to our selves and the world around us, and as a result of this I’ve noticed my colour palettes feel a bit more acidic and bruised.

A lot of my work focuses on the dichotomies of feeling lonely or lost even whilst being part of a crowd, or a shared social space or experience. Lockdown accelerated this! I was thinking about how we were all sharing our isolation, whilst at the same time madly missing and craving real life and social interaction. A lot of my paintings reflect that desire to connect physically again, and provide care and comfort whilst also suggesting the difficulties that come with that.

Painting is such a physical process in itself and as a medium feels quite resistant to digital technology, which is ironic that most art is being viewed online now more than ever!"