Image credits: Tristan Bouan
Harriet Gillett (1995) is an artist living and working in London. She holds a BA in English Literature and graduated from an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds art school last year. She was shortlisted for the Ingram prize in 2020 and won the Federation of British Artists mentorship prize in 2021. Recent exhibitions include group shows at Brooke Benington, Roman Road, Delphian x Saatchi and a duo at Soho Revue.
Gillett's practice attempts to slow down our increasingly fast-paced encounters into images of reverie. Taking reference from the charged vibrancy of post-impressionism and the devotional nature of western religious formats, her combination of traditional subjects with contemporary materials enables her to playfully tread a line between multiple perspectives and time periods. Drawing inspiration from artists working in the late 19th century and early 20th, her process reflects theirs. Basing her paintings on brief, impressionistic pencil sketches made from life, often at pubs and live gigs, she adopts a surrealistic logic when painting to transform these familiar scenes.
Working predominantly with oil and spray-paint, she layers thin veils of suggestive brushwork over a warm fluorescent ground that is reminiscent of the gold within icon paintings and a "rose-tinted" lens; enabling the work to position itself between the past and present, the traditional and the contemporary, both in terms of its imagery and materiality. Paint operates as a metaphor for both instability and potential transformation, allowing for a fluidity of form. Things teeter anxiously at the brink of abstraction, prevented from falling apart. The influence of memory becomes evident in the tension between clarity and haziness; moments of emphatic linework punctuate smoky layers of pollutant colour, where figures morph and merge with their landscapes. Literature is a key inspiration and text is sometimes added to suggest another layer of perspective.
Moving between intimate works evoking personal memories, and scaled-up pieces that take on a more universal quality, the results are dreamlike and lyrical explorations of a more psychological approach to time and place.