Harriet Gillett
Responding to an increasingly digitalised world where images and time periods merge and appear in one seemingly eternal present, Harriet Gillett’s practice attempts to slow down these increasingly fast-paced encounters into images of reverie.
Taking reference from the charged vibrancy of post-impressionism and the devotional nature of western religious formats, her combination of traditional subjects with contemporary materials enables her to playfully tread a line between multiple perspectives and time periods.
Basing her paintings on brief, impressionistic pencil sketches made from life, often at pubs and live gigs, she adopts a surrealistic logic when painting to transform these familiar scenes.
Working predominantly with oil and spray-paint, she layers thin veils of suggestive brushwork over a warm fluorescent ground that is reminiscent of the gold within icon paintings and a “rose-tinted” lens; enabling the work to position itself between the past and present, the traditional and the contemporary, both in terms of its imagery and materiality.
Paint operates as a metaphor for both instability and potential transformation, allowing for a fluidity of form. Things teeter anxiously at the brink of abstraction, prevented from falling apart. The influence of memory becomes evident in the tension between clarity and haziness; moments of emphatic line-work punctuate smoky layers of pollutant colour, where figures morph and merge with their landscapes. Literature is a key inspiration and text is sometimes added to suggest another layer of perspective.
