Harriet Gillett: A Clearer Morning

Fred Levine is delighted to announce its upcoming presentation ‘A Clearer Morning’, featuring new paintings by London based artist, Harriet Gillett. 

Taking its title from a poem of the same name in Louise Glück’s poetry collection ‘The Wild Iris’, the paintings in this exhibition revolve around the theme of Spring; hope, transformation and re-emergence after a period of dormancy. The paintings reflect a process of slow looking, and a shifting of perspective for growth similarly to that in Glück’s collection, which charts her overcoming block through imagining life from the perspective of a flower. 

Works such as Equinox, a term which not only evokes points of transition in our yearly calendar but thresholds that mark a new season and a shift in perception. In 'A Clear Morning' Imagery is drawn from fragments of the artist’s daily life, a documention of recurring motifs that appear to her and gather meaning as they repeat. The atmosphere of collective gathering within the live music scene are contrasted with aspects of the natural world after a month spent in Hampshire watching the seasons change. These elements are not rendered directly, but absorbed into compositions that feel as though they are still forming. Her titles gesture outwards to other songwriters, poets and painters who inform each narrative.

Gillett's work bridges personal memory and universal resonance. Her use of materials such as spray paint and veils of colour create a tension between permanence and transience, echoing the blurred boundaries between past and present, experienced and imagined.

There is an attentiveness in the paintings of Harriet Gillett that feels inseparable from the tentative unfolding of Spring, the surfaces do not announce themselves , they emerge, colour seeps rather than declares, as if they have been coaxed into being by light, there is a quiet insistence that mirrors when growth is uncertain and beauty is edged with hesitation. 

In the poem, 'The Wild Iris' by Louise Gluck we can visualise the voice of the garden which speaks in cycles of dormancy and return. Gluck’s flowers do not bloom, they remember the ground they push through and the silence that preceded them, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” the Iris declares-an image that holds both rupture and renewal, a passage rather than a conclusion. Gillett’s paintings are less about arrival than about emergence: forms hovering at the edge of legibility, as though still deciding whether to come fully into view.