Canaday Gallery, 7th September–10th October 2010

Rebecca Harris has presented work at COCA on a number of occasions since her first solo exhibition, Settling In (2005). Elements of her current style began to emerge in her following COCA show, My Beautiful Nightmare (2006). In a work like Harpie, for example, Harris pictures figures (human and animal) in ornate natural settings, and generates an uneasy relationship between the beautiful and the macabre. In a number of pieces created since 2008, Harris goes one step further, and in a manner reminiscent of paintings by Joanna Braithwaite, melds animal and human forms to create fantastical chimeras that are simultaneously light-hearted and disturbing. Also significant is that, by presenting her work in the form of decorative ceramic tondos, Harris blurs boundaries between sculpture and painting, craft and fine art.

In the painted stoneware vases and amphoras created for Bird and Beast, these stylistic and thematic preoccupations persist. On the front and rear faces of these pieces, Harris depicts horses, cats and birds - seeking, in each case, to 'capture the individual characteristics of these species.' The trope of transformation, with which Harris plays in her human/animal hybrids, is reiterated in the status of her kiln-fired artworks as hand-coiled clays, sigillata and Porcelaine pigments metamorphosed through the application of intense heat. Whilst a human figurative element seems absent in these new works, the characteristic shape of Harris' creations resonates with the existence of a cultural legacy where female-ness has often been characterized as vessel-like (Catholic iconography relating to the Virgin Mary, for example, or any number of Rococo and Neoclassical paintings where comely maidens brandish vases and gourds).

Over time, this visual sign for the female principle has informed the products of mass consumer culture as much as the academy, and indeed Harris asserts that her current works are 'loosely based on... 1950s shapes and styles of vessels and vases' as well as items viewed in 'second-hand shops and white elephant stalls.' This affinity for items often dismissed as kitsch is yet another current in Harris' oeuvre - one evident, for example, in the garishly pink 'girl racer' hoodie worn by the hybrid woman/rabbit in her painting Linwood Chic (2008). Evidently, then, Harris' depictions of wild creatures confined within earthenware vessels are less concerned with a simplistic, essentialist identification of 'woman with nature' than with unsettling and placing in question those categories
and cultural norms by which we ordinarily define 'femaleness,' 'human,' 'nature,' 'culture,' 'craft,'
and 'fine art.'

David Khan

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