Caroline Jane Harris
Caroline Jane Harris
Caroline Jane Harris (B. 1987, UK) lives and works in London. She 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.
Harris was Florence Trust Residency Artist 2016–17 and Research Printmaking Fellow at City & Guilds of London Art School 2016–18. In 2018 she was awarded a solo exhibition by ASC Gallery, as well as winner of Dentons Art Prize in 2019 and nominee for Queen Sonja Print Award (2020). Solo exhibitions include A Stopped World, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin (2020-2021); 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).
A Stopped World
Whilst public knowledge of ‘global’ events has greatly increased, due to our shared connectivity through the internet, these large-scale phenomena have become detached from their origins and compressed into accessible portable content; turning films into clips, disasters into distractions. In A Stopped World, video-clips of volcanic eruptions screen-captured from the deluge of digital uploads have been reformatted into tangible spectacles, putting us in touch with deep time in the present moment.
Caroline Jane Harris’ work hybridises traditional, historic techniques with digital technologies to pursue questions around materiality and perception in the Information Age. Intending to serve peace through meditative acts, her artworks that go against the grain of speed and automation as an antidote to our fast-paced world.
Through manual processes, she forges a relationship between paper, interventions and the audience. With a scalpel she intricately cuts-out digital prints in ‘bitmap’ matrixes, embedding minute traces of the artist’s hand, turning two-dimensional prints into three-dimensional layered pictures that index both the human and non-human actors involved in the process. Beauty and imperfection are harnessed as tools to invite a slow contemplation of the aura of the handmade.
Chosen subjects are images sourced – from personal archives, online videos, websites, found books and analogue photographs – to collapse and construe time, dimensions and media. The works offer up an arena for a slow, exploratory engagement to examine contemporary habits of seeing through critical acts of looking.
Image: Caroline Jane Harris, A Stopped World, 2020, 16 layered hand-cut pigment prints, 236 x 360cm total, 57 x 88cm each. Galway Arts Centre. Photo: Ros Kavanagh