Throughout art history, artists who have been inspired by nature often find themselves defined by their subject matter rather than their medium. John Constable, for example, is described onWikipedia as an “English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition” and Caspar David Friedrich as a “German Romantic landscape painter ”. To define Kerry Harding as a ‘landscape painter’ would, however, be misleading. For her, the landscape functions as much as medium as it does subject matter, a visual tool through which the artist explores the technical possibilities of oil painting. Her work, as a result, traverses many genres, from romanticism to the uncanny, from photorealism to the abstract.
In short, Harding is not a landscape painter who uses oil, she is an oil painter who uses the landscape. Living alongside the same stretch of coast for over twenty years, Harding is in sync with the cyclical nature of her environment. Following the continuous shift in the sun’s movements, tidal times and weather, her life and routine are guided by the seasons; from planning surf times and dog walks, to observing the shifting effects on the landscape that wraps around her, the artist’s visual experience of the world’s unending repetition is reflected in her practice.
Through prolonged examination and repeated enquiry of these visual references, the artist has developed a highly unique approach that allows her to break the landscape down into its constituent parts and reassemble them in endlessly varied combinations. In Harding’s latest series of paintings, this sense of repetition and reflection in nature is brought into focus. Mirroring between sea and sky have long been features of her work, often blurring the horizon and purposefully distorting the sense of reality on view, but in her new paintings she delves deeper. Dividing scenes along the vertical, rather than horizontal, trees and headlands mirror each other to create a new, distinct sense of distortion. Reminiscent of the Rorschach inkblot psychology tests, the effect is such that the viewer is drawn further away from recognition of the scene as a landscape and further into the sphere of abstraction and dreamscapes. In doing so, we are encouraged to share the artist’s enjoyment of producing such detailed sections of replication as an opportunity for meditation and self-reflection.
One of the most striking features along the coastline where Harding lives is the enduring presence of its trees. It is the coastal conditions that have undoubtedly shaped these forms and yet they stand resilient, their silhouettes acting as markers along the headland that both punctuate and puncture the boundary between land and sky. In Harding’s latest work, the visual impact of their curved trunks and windswept canopies are amplified by the mirroring of their forms and the larger scale they occupy on the canvas. Cogniscant that trees are often used as a visual metaphor for the artist themselves, Harding muses that there may indeed be an autobiographical thread within her own work, a subconscious representation of her own, deep-rooted, relationship with the landscape she lives within.
In creating works that do not attempt to replicate reality, Harding brings us closer to how she draws inspiration from nature; the shapes and silhouettes found within the landscape, how they interact with each other, how they replicate throughout nature and the patterns they form, are endlessly faschinating to the artist. It is remarkable that the same visual cues and box of photographic references to this landscape have sustained the artist’s visual inspiration for so long, but it is precisely this radical approach to the use of the landscape that has allowed the artist to reach this point in her career and continues to drive her creatively. Honing in on her interest in pattern and the artistic opportunities to slow a painting’s creation down through detailed replication of forms, combined with her established technique of repurposing older paintings and application of solvent to create expressive sections of canvas, Harding’s latest body of work demonstrates the enduring creative power of her practice.
Written by Isabella Joughin