Jane Harris, 1956 - 2022: Viewing Room

Jane Harris was born in Dorset, UK in 1956. She received a Higher Diploma Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1981 and an MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 1991. She was a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths from 1991 until 2006 when she moved to France.

Her work is held in major collections; The Arts Council England; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Colorado University Art Museum; Ernst & Young, London; Fidelity Worldwide Investment; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; FRAC MÈCA La Nouvelle Aquitaine, FRAC-Artothèque Limousin, FRAC Poitou- Charente; Marsh, London; Pallant House, Chichester (Golder-Thompson Gift); Pictet & Cie, London; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Southampton City Art Gallery and the UK Government Art Collection.

In 1995 she was awarded the Arts Foundation Painting Fellowship and Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, CT, USA, in 2011 and 2015. She has been a prize winner at the John Moores Liverpool (1995) and the Jerwood Drawing Open (1996) and in 2012 she won The Sunny Dupree Family Award for a woman artist at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The estate of Jane Harris is represented by Freeny Yianni, CLOSE Ltd and Prue O’Day. 

Jane Harris investigated the geometric form of the ellipse - an elastic shape that lends itself to allusion and can take on multiple identities. Drawn from templates, the forms are painted in various relationships to each other, in two or three colours. From these simple parameters she created images that remind how the basic effects of all painting lie in the movement of light passing across a surface, which carries the substance of 'formed and transformed' matter. Her paintings express and originate from an intense involvement with the natural world and phenomena that exist within it: the sun backlighting a cloud, or the movement of wind on water, the granular quality of dusk. Her elliptical forms have a slippery kind of ambiguity and through her handling of paint she proposed various possibilities for how we perceive them. Hovering between non-figurative and figurative, they can be apprehended as shapes which appear flat on the surface of a support while simultaneously carrying a sense of recessional depth.

A survey of Jane Harris' work will open at Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine La MÉCA, Bordeaux, 16 February - 30 June 2024.

Jane Harris CV