In Midst, Unfolding: Connie Harrison

On looking at Connie Harrison’s paintings, complex blocks of colour begin to delineate tantalising glimpses of landscape scenes overflowing with life, before dissolving once more into abstraction. The images grow from a central point in the composition, constantly unfolding into organic multifaceted geometries as though refracted through a prism. 

Harrison chooses to avoid sky-blue tones or obvious horizon lines, instead allowing the contours and vegetation of the landscape to expand to the boundaries of the canvas. The viewer is enticed into the atmospheric world of the image, while also held simultaneously at arm’s length by the uncertainties of the picture plane and perspective. It is not clear how one might step into these scenes; there is nowhere to put your feet and the vanishing point is often elusive. The title reference to “in midst” calls to mind the association of mistiness and atmosphere, hinting at how forms appear to emerge mysteriously through a haze before sinking quietly away again. 

These compositions have an ungraspable quality, which is powerfully juxtaposed with the tactility of the paintings’ textured surfaces. The artist uses a process of applying layers of paint separated by coatings of translucent wax paste. She then scrapes back into the paint, working backwards to reveal the layers, excavating the composition in an almost sculptural way. Harrison conceives of her myriad brushstrokes as being like individual leaves or blades of grass, building up to form a greater whole. 

The artist uses digital technology to plan her insistently physical canvases, superimposing large semi-transparent or outlined flowers onto landscapes to both distort and enhance the underlying image. The fragile individual blossoms act as hyper-magnified elements of the wider environment, creating a cross-pollination between foreground and background. This serves to obfuscate both elements through abstraction while simultaneously grafting them together into a cohesive distillation of the natural world. 

In Midst, Unfolding is an expression of the artist’s personal relationship with nature, drawing on childhood memories and a desire to find solace and slowness in gardens and rural places. Harrison connects her labour-intensive, process-driven way of working to the evolvement of natural rhythms and cycles across a range of temporal scales, from the seasonal to the geological. 

In particular, the layered make-up of Harrison’s paintings echoes both the slow creation of sedimentary rock deposits over the course of time and their subsequent erosion by the forces of nature. As she puts it, “Much like the fossil, my 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.”

Anna Souter

November 2023