Connie Harrison engages with the natural world as both muse and subject. She works by overlaying landscapes with different compositions and building up an overall heightened sense of reality. Using a process of applying layers of paint separated by coatings of translucent wax paste. She scrapes back into the paint to reveal the layers, excavating the composition in an almost sculptural way. Layered brushstrokes of colour are applied in combinations that gradually build up to depict natural forms and elements of landscapes. Floating between foreground and background, in and out of familiarity. Unfolding, overlaying and entwining, the work stimulates movement and depth to the imagery as if they are growing.

 

Her process is similar to that of natural rhythms and circular life cycles. The paintings grow organically, layer by layer, working on and developing both an underlying and a super-imposed image. Very deep in places and in others more exposed to reveal earlier traces of the painting below. Working sensitively, she attempts to unearth a form from the materials or to strip away the marks of old interventions to get to an early and evocative form. Through a desire to find solace and slowness, Harrison connects her labour-intensive, process-driven way of working to unconsciously and intuitively allow the energy of the natural world to flow through her work.

 

"The unknowability and mystery of the more-than-human world is a thematic thread that emerges throughout the exhibition, in which the artists repeatedly challenge viewers’ perceptions of ecologies and the positioning of human beings within environments. Connie Harrison does this by rejecting the traditional rules of landscape painting, eschewing the formal device of foreground, background, and horizon line in favour of a prismatic approach to composition that blossoms from a central point in the canvas. Blocks of highly textured colour fill the picture plane, dissolving in and out of abstraction, overflowing with life. Harrison’s paintings reject division and definition, instead embracing a sensual multiplicity in relation to the earth and its elements."
[Excerpt from 'Meeting Points Within This Elemental Mesh. an Essay by Anna Souter]