Harriet Gillett: A Clearer Morning

Poets have always found spring fertile with creative inspiration and meaning. To Louise Glück, spring is the ‘raw wind of the new world’; in T.S Eliot, April is a cruel month that breeds ‘lilacs out of dead land, mixing memory with desire’, and  Sylvia Plath wrote wistfully of ‘this keen spirit-whetting air’. For Harriet Gillett, spring is a powerful metaphor to explore broader themes of hope, transformation and reemergence, this time through the medium of paint. Her rose-tinted compositions draw upon vast literary and musical references, meanwhile employing imagery from personal experience and observation. ‘A Clearer Morning’ takes its title from a Louise Glück poem of the same name, one written after an intense period of personal struggle and creative block in the poet’s life. Allusions are not just references for Gillett, but a way of moving through the world: art becomes inseparable from lived experience. This poetic point of view seeps into her paintings with subtle force; swathes of vibrating colour, fluid forms that blend image with line and song lyrics lovingly jotted onto canvas borders.

The arrival of spring is a durational certainty. But it also carries a paradoxical sense of anticipation: when will change come and what will it look like? Gillett’s works have an elastic understanding of time that shrinks and expands at will. Though seasonal motifs (leaping rabbits and delicate birds) populate these canvases, the sites they inhabit are less familiar. ‘Equinox’ renders The George Tavern in London, its façade softened to purple plumes of smoke, mirroring the cloudy skies behind. In the foreground, two figures lean toward each other with only one of their faces visible. A candle surfaces in the lower corner, serving as an anchor for the composition. The artist moves seamlessly between interior and exterior venue, between the experience of live music and private conversation between friends. There are no harsh edges, no singular scene; all of public and private life becomes indistinguishable, from nicotine-stained pub ceiling to hazy landscape. A season, as much as a day, can be compressed through pictorial and formal layering.  Viewers are often placed directly in the image, as if looking out onto a view from an angle or standing directly behind a person in a crowd. Despite this use of perspective, there is a heightened sense of what is not revealed; the particular relationships, events and places that purposefully invite closer readings of Gillett’s work.

At the center of a ‘A Clearer Morning’, Gillett instills a sense of reverence for ordinary life. Her small scale works, a hazel leaf or a candle,  appear to float on coloured ground, turning a single object into a sacred moment. On a larger scale, Gillett’s canvas serves as a cinematic frame. She presents scenes of communal experience with striking dynamism. We enter an embodied experience that allows the eye and mind to wander; faces without features, shifting interiors and doorways that lead to uncertain spaces.  Each event appears as though we watch it just on the precipice: forms waver between figurative and abstract, paint lingers between shades of feeling. Fluorescent flecks illuminate her images, a layer created by mists of spray paint as well as oil paint, creating a bridge between painterly tradition and modern life.

Gillett’s expressionistic use of colour —  deep purples, electric blue, pinks — create an expanse of energy freed from representation. In That Blue between Clouds, Gillett alludes to Kate Bush’s ‘Symphony in Blue’, wherein the speaker describes her room, her mood, walls and between clouds as blue. Despite this litany, blue is not tied to a singular emotion like sadness.  Moving from her surroundings, inner life and to the external world, it emerges that her life is not subsumed to blue, but in fact expanded by it. Gillett’s paintings strongly align with this sense, as her crowds can feel like microcosms for human experience, affirming beauty and moments of clarity in the everyday.

Text by Anna Moss

April 2026