Artist Story: Kirsty Harris

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

When I was a kid, I wanted to translate things inside my head into something real. I needed to practise some techniques to enable this and I think this is how I became an artist.

Encouragement was a major factor in pushing me down the path. When I was about eight, I painted a very expressive butterfly and posted it off to Blue Peter. They exhibited it at the Natural History Museum and my family took me on a trip to London to go and see it. It was the most exciting experience to see that people were looking at my little butterfly, within this vast landscape of other important creatures. It was always art or monkeys; I would have worked raising tiny monkeys in a sanctuary on the equator otherwise.

The anticipation of piling onto a coach and ending up somewhere waving our homemade banners and singing and shouting at CND protests are evocative memories from my childhood. In our doorway at home, visitors were welcomed by a massive poster of Thatcher and Reagan parodied in a Gone With The Wind movie-style poster, complete with a mushroom cloud in the background. It was a bit like a precursor to memes. We collected protest badges and leaflets and the atmosphere was potent and thrilling, but I didn’t really catch on to what we were shouting about until later. I think this all led to me exploring nuclear explosions as cultural, historical and iconic symbols in my artistic practice.

You often catalogue or record information and data about the character of a particular bomb or explosion in quite subtle ways within your work. Would you say that you have a forensic approach to making art?

Rather than approaching it forensically, I think I have used data to construct systems that help me make decisions when creating work. In my paintings, often each square inch (or centimetre) of linen represents a certain number of tons of TNT. This in turn is the unit of measurement chosen, by the military, to signify the yield of the explosion. These hidden codes also reward an attentive audience, who may be surprised when contemplating their destructive power.

In the publication, Completely er, unfolding itself (2019) (1), I transcribed the first live official television broadcast of an atomic explosion – given the code name ‘Charlie’ – in 1942. The reporters struggle and grasp for the language to describe the mushroom cloud in front of them.

I also started an audio composition back in 2014 entitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying (1945-2022) (2), which I update each time it is exhibited. It is a musical account of every officially recorded nuclear explosion detonated between 1945 and the present day: each different instrument represents a country that partook; each month in history lasts a second on the recording; each note played depicts a single bomb. Eight musicians contributed to the piece and it was quite an epic translation of data involving a massive spreadsheet – not something I’d ever thought would be a tool I would use to make art.

A final example: I was unsure which shade of grey to paint a plinth (which housed a tiny projection of a war plane being decimated by a Chinese PLA atom bomb). I finally decided to take a printout of one of Andy Warhol’s Chairman Mao paintings to the DIY shop and got that colour of grey mixed up. The fewer arbitrary decisions I have to make, the better the remaining ones go.

Have public information films and TV news documentaries from the 1970s and 80s influenced your work?

The Protect and Survive campaign directly influenced my work, as you can see in my Comrades and Fall Out/Lean to series of ceramic sandbags, mattresses and pillows. I also caught onto the fact that these leaflets and animated warnings encouraged the public to whitewash their windows to deflect and minimise the destructive power of a nuclear blast. Something which would have been largely a futile task, but idle hands and all that. I’ve used this to create slogans on windows from the obvious HELP written backwards, to IT WORKED.

When I was young, we used to give out flyers for a VHS rental guy who would drive around, like an ice cream van. So, as kids, we had access to all the disaster films we wanted like Miracle Mile and The Day After. Possibly the most effective ‘public information film’ was Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s 1984 drama, Threads, which was wheeled out on a massive telly at school, taking the place of a poorly teacher. Anyone who has seen it would agree it is absolutely terrifying, especially if viewed at a young age.

Art can be thought of as what drips through the fine mesh of a filter – the filter being the artist.

Environmental disaster, terrorism and fear of pandemic have been more at the forefront of our thoughts in recent years than the threat of nuclear annihilation. Can the iconography of the cold war be seen as a metaphor or stand in for these more recent threats?

Not exactly, but I think ruminating on annihilation has always been a preoccupation of the creative imagination. Cataclysmic uncertainty has always interested us, whether it takes the form of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Orwell’s 1984, Mad Max or Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. The descent into chaos and loss of control at the centre of all these, somehow, feels the same. Any fear will do. Nuclear annihilation has always been at the front of my mind, and when you discover the Doomsday Clock that encompasses all our worries, life doesn’t get any more care-free.

But while the wider political landscape can definitely ignite a fire in our bellies (and art can reflect that in incredible ways), a certain amount of stability is needed, we strive for it, in order to make work consistently. Artists have to be great at adapting (we are always getting things taken from us) but I yearn for a massive studio space that I can escape to and get my head down in – not a leaky little shed with Molotov cocktails flying by the window!

You’ve mentioned that as a child you took part in CND protests, and your mother spent time at the peace camp at Greenham Common. Are the aesthetics of protest important to you in terms of how you present your work?

Yes, I have found it creeping more and more into the imaginings of how my work is displayed. For my solo exhibition in 2023 at Studio KIND in Braunton, Devon, I am working on some machine-woven tapestries that I may show propped up with two poles, much like large protest banners.

Is making art a form of protest for you?

Rather than a direct protest, I want it to feel confrontational, sometimes even abrupt at first, then hopefully unravelling into something more for the viewer. I want to make paintings so vast that that’s all the viewer sees and thinks about for a moment. I developed an interactive artwork called Cold Call (How I learned to Stop Worrying), which is a Bakelite telephone that rings every 20 minutes. The audio piece is something that surprises many people as it reflects the magnitude of nuclear testing and exactly how many detonations have taken place across the world.

Having said that, I have also made an audio work, You Can’t Kill The Spirit (2019) (3), by layering the voices of the women at Greenham Common, that builds up to something sounding like a beautiful war cry. I also recreated certain artefacts that were in the backgrounds of my mother’s photographs of the protests that were shown in my exhibition ‘Women Walked Onto the Base Last Tuesday’.

Is the idea of the sublime important to you, particularly with reference to landscape painting?

Yes, since I realised that beauty doesn’t have a moral duty to be inherently good. It’s something I think about a lot, the push and pull of awe and how it can sit, rest, shoot through the notion of the sublime, down to Hades and back again.

Are there any landscape painters whose works you particularly admire?

Often when a landscape painting catches me, it is a good old Constable. I used to find landscapes so boring when I was at college, but then I came across Constable’s Landscape With a Double Rainbow for example, and it’s so fucking cool. Maybe it’s me just getting old though!

In terms of contemporary landscape painters, I like some of Mamma Andersson’s work and I saw a show of Jules de Balincourt’s work a few years ago that really caught on in my mind. Veja Celmins is a clear favourite of mine, as are some of Gerhard Richter’s landscapes. Tacita Dean, Peter Doig, Paul Gauguin… but I’m also drawn to artists who disrupt landscapes such as Nancy Holt and Judy Chicago. I never loved Turner, apart from his moonlit ones, however I find the notion of the volcano’s influence on his work interesting.

How important are artist residencies and research trips in terms of developing your practice and ideas? Is collaboration and working with other artists important?

I have enjoyed Art Weekenders in different cities like Plymouth and Middlesbrough. It feels like a lot of work to exhibit for such a short time span, but I’ve found them so dynamic. You get to meet lots of other artists and talk ideas and immerse yourself in the city. I recently returned to Karst in Plymouth for a short residency to try and clear my mind and spend more time on research. Next year I want to make trips out to see more nuclear bunkers and sites of interest, possibly leading to DIY interventions or performances.

In our current studio at Chisenhale Studios in London’s east end, Henrietta Armstrong and myself created ‘Come Quick Disaster’, a platform for art. We hold crits and talks, creating connections between artists and encouraging the general public to get involved and to see, experience and talk about art at its conception rather than when it is exhibited in galleries. Lizz Brady is one of the only artists I have actually collaboratively made work with. She has a great energy and sense of experimentation.

You’ve made a series of oil paintings on glass, and you also make work in silverpoint, which is quite a delicate medium. What attracts you about using such fragile and delicate media?

I remember queueing at 6am in the snow to see the ‘Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ exhibition at the National Gallery in 2012, and maybe it was the muted softness of London that made me look more carefully, as somehow a tiny silverpoint piece of his stood out to me. Who better to be inspired by eh? I just immediately had to have-a-go with metalpoint. I was making work in my bedroom at the time and so the scale of these little oak panels suited my situation. In no way have I explored the medium as fully as I would like to, so there’s lots of scope for experimentation.

I’m working on some paintings on tempered glass at the moment. I’m playing with the thought that something we deem fragile can be made strong – to the point that it can support a great weight.

Recently, you’ve made some small paintings of clouds that seem to be the antithesis of your large-scale mushroom cloud paintings. Are these paintings a bit of an artistic escape?

Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Sometimes we have to do what makes us feel calm in order to continue and I really enjoy making them ‘en plein air’ when I’m travelling. Those Impressionists were onto something.

And during the 2022 Venice Biennale you staged a performative intervention, parading around the Arsenale like a standard bearer holding one of these cloud paintings aloft.

It was my first ever visit to Venice this year, initially as a technician on Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press’ exhibition. I was blown away by the grandeur – art was everywhere you looked. It felt full of energy and I wanted to infiltrate this island and get involved. So, I planned a trip back with Graham, my partner in crime. The cloud on a stick was a little bit punky, which is kinda difficult to do with such benign imagery. But the idea was that I came along and would ruin the sunny day by blocking out the sun. The stick once again alluded to ideas of protest and a fight against the status quo. It was playful and got people talking and laughing and taking photos of the spectacle.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

In 2015, Breeze Creatives invited applications for a series of Experimental Studio Residencies hosted by Vane. At the time, I only had a small area of my flat as a studio, but I had a very supportive friend Helen up north with a spare room. I applied successfully and managed to secure Arts Council England funding to help pay for the travel costs from London. It was a big studio, and I made the most of it embarking on a journey towards much larger and more ambitious work. It was pretty exciting to meet this group of artists with their own concerns and brilliant ideas, who all seemed to be concentrated in Commercial Union House in Newcastle, where Vane was based at the time. I started chatting to Paul Jex on our cigarette breaks, discovering his intriguing practice had such depth, while Nick Christie and I endeavoured to create cyanotypes on glass. Jonpaul Kirvan and Peter Marchal from Ampersand Inventions welcomed me in with tea and open arms, and I organised crits with Melanie Kyles and Alannah Lamb. James Daltry and Narbi Price from the studios upstairs were warm and friendly, opening up their studios and organising charity auctions. It was a building buzzing with energy, and I was lucky to have experienced it.

Chris and Paul invited me to propose a solo show at Vane, and I’d already imagined how this could look. ‘A Foul and Awesome Display’ (2019) was conceived. To have the chance to show in such a renowned space was incredible, and a big step up for my career. I knew the back part of the gallery would be massive projections that Lizz Brady came up from Manchester to help me format, so they would fit the walls exactly, no mean feat! Vane encouraged me to do an artist talk and I asked Dr Daniel Barnes to lead us through the exhibition. It encompassed what I hope was a great balance of media from risograph prints, paintings, projections, audio, sculpture and even a piece which invited the viewer to eat the apple that was a part of it.

Although the residency only lasted a few months, I made some lifelong friends. Every time I go up for a visit, I have the most amazing and memorable conversations with artists I’ve never met before. It is almost unheard of, and a testimony to Chris and Paul’s dedication to artists, that Vane is thriving 25 years after its inception.

Interview by Stephen Palmer

Links

(1) ‘Completely er, unfolding itself’, Kirsty Harris, 32 page black and white publication with risograph cover

(2) ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying (1945-2022)’, Kirsty Harris, excerpt, Vimeo

(3) ‘You Can't Kill The Spirit’, Kirsty Harris, 2019, audio composition layering the voices of the women at Greenham Common Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp

Read more about Kirsty Harris’ exhibitions at Vane.