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Caroline Jane Harris - A Stopped World
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Caroline Jane Harris
Caroline Jane Harris (b. 1987, UK) lives and works in London. Harris received her BA (Hons) Fine Art Printmaking from the University of Brighton in 2009, followed by her MA (Distinction) from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2015, where she was awarded the Norman Ackroyd Prize for Etching and the Roger de Grey Drawing Prize. She was subsequently invited to stay on as Research Printmaking Fellow at the same school (2016-18). Harris creates meticulous hybrid artworks that traverse time, dimension and materiality. Central to each work, is a digital photograph that has been precisely cut-out by hand, translating immaterial image into lived experience for both artist and viewer in each iteration of Harris' evolving applied processes. In 2020, she was a Nominee for the Queen Sonja Print Award, after having won in 2019 the Dentons Art Prize 8. In 2016-17 she was a selected artist in residence at the Florence Trust, London and awarded a solo show, A Bright Haunting, at ASC gallery and Fellow Show, City & Guilds of London Art School, London both in 2018. Recent solo shows include A Three-Dimensional Sky, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2019); A Bright Haunting, ASC Gallery, London (2018); Anatomy of the Arboreal, Scream Gallery, London (2014); and Lifelines, The Muse Gallery, London (2011). Selected group shows include Enter Art Fair, with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Piecemeals, Curated by Chloe Stavrou, Eccleston Project Space, London (2019); Creekside Open, Selected by Sacha Craddock, A.P.T. Gallery, London (2019); Art Dubai, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Dubai (2019);The Metallurgical Ouroboros, Curated by Samuel Capps, Gossamer Fog, London (2018); Slow Seeing/Slow Data, MA Graduates, Artists in Residence and Fellows Show, City & Guilds of London Art School, London (2018); Made in Brixton - After Dark, Selected by Anna Sparham in collaboration with the Museum of London, Photofusion, London (2018). Harris has been featured in publications such as Trebuchet Magazine, Art Maze Mag, Red magazine and Paper Play (Sandu Cultural Media 2014).
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A Stopped World
A vast textured sky, bruised blue, purple and pink, with billowing clouds of smoke simultaneously evokes a sense of stillness and motion, fragility and power. Turning her eye once again to reproductions of nature's expanse, British artist Caroline Jane Harris' new body of work explores the making and manifestation of imagery in the digital age. Combining subjects captured from books and internet videos with her signature process of cutting-out digital prints by hand, Harris creates visually complex and arresting works that re-examine the tactility and dimensionality of images. A Stopped World, her solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin, offers a meticulous examination of our engagement with technology, habits of perception, and experience of time and space.
In Harris' work subject-matters aren't preconceived. Instead, the artist collects images that she's drawn to from various sources, which are detached from their original contexts and later, imbued with new meaning through her layered creative process. For this body of work, the artist photographed aerial photographs in found books, bestowing a lack of definition and veracity to the original source. She also took screencaptures of internet videos, a process which she likens to 'the analogue technique of a cameraless photograph', deliberately embracing the poor quality that is often the by-product of the digital realm. The artist then used a scalpel to cut into the printed images by hand, drawing on the software function of a 'bitmap' image to create artworks that investigate the mechanics of seeing in a digital world. -
Enquire
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Caroline Jane Harris, Deep, Slow, Still II, 2020
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Caroline Jane Harris, Deep, Slow, Still I, 2020
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Caroline Jane Harris, Flat Earth (Tilt), 2020
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Caroline Jane Harris, Flat Earth (Sweep), 2020
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The process of making 'images of images' is central to the artist's practice and relates to the contemporary condition of our culture in which media no longer simply relays information but stands as a substitute for the real. The large-scale artwork entitled A Stopped World, which sits as one of the exhibition's centrepiece, is composed of a series of sixteen screenshots captured from an online video of a volcanic eruption. Viewed from a distance the image offers an experience of motion and time suspended in which our gaze adjusts to perceive an overwhelming sense of beauty and wholeness that reflects on historic artistic representations of nature and the sublime. However, as we step closer, the irregular hand-cut pixels reveal themselves, breaking apart the surface and complicating our perception.
A second enveloping work In Bloom features the same sixteen tiled cut-outs, this time cut from a delicate, natural coloured Japanese Kozo paper and installed unframed. In this work, a single eruption precariously floats off the -
wall, creating tension between the brutal power of the subject matter and the palpable fragility of the artistic material. Again, this recalls the Romantic tradition in which the frailty and transience of human existence is underlined in the context of nature's timelessness. Though here, Harris is not so much reflecting on nature, but questions the permanence and vulnerability of images themselves.
As with all of her works, the artist leaves the "detritus of the process" visible where paper becomes removed to the extent that it falls away, subtly acknowledging the implications of a bodily engagement with analogue media. As the title of the exhibition suggests, these are artworks that demand slow, meditative contemplation. Though complex in their making, the images allow for an experience that is not only visual, but also felt.
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Caroline Jane Harris
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