Holly Harrison

Over the past few years, the moon has become another touchpoint theme for me in my work and has been the inspiration for a few different bodies of work including the conceptual Recycled Moon paintings that are part of the Poetic Grid series.  

The Paper Moons series is a more recent exploration, with heavily collaged moons taking center stage in a rich navy blue sky, both with and without starlings.

Birds have long inspired me as a subject for creative work. Visible everywhere, they are completely familiar and yet so odd and foreign. I’m especially drawn to starling murmurations, which have been the focus of several series.

Starlings can fly at high speeds almost as one body, careening through the air by the hundreds and yet never crashing into each other, due to their ability to visually track up to six to seven other birds. During the pandemic, as we masked up for grocery store runs and stood in lines six feet apart, I found myself thinking about how our pandemic experiences could change our sense of personal space. Would we internalize the six feet in some way that sticks? When does habit become instinct? Was this a watershed moment in our human development or would this spatial awareness just fade away when we no longer needed it?

To me these questions felt connected to starlings and their innate tracking abilities, which in my imagination became a kind of radiating circle, expanding out from each bird. I added circles of paper and graphite to the flocks to symbolize both the awareness between starlings and our own pandemic-era internalization of social distance. Paintings like Lovely Day and Theatre of Air are part of this series.

At the top of the page, Winter Moon, Gold Rush and Red Sun are the start of a new series, which situates murmurations within flattened, semi-abstracted landscapes that use painted patterning to represent different compositional elements. It’s almost a reverse impulse to “bringing the outdoors in” by layering wallpaper-like designs into the landscape.

Lastly, A Rumble of Wings is an example of an earlier series called The Language of Lines, in which I layered a slow buildup of paint and collage over a colorful underpainting and used tape to mask and reveal horizontal stripes of color. I’m especially interested in the interplay between the painted stripes and the organic shapes of birds, trees and wings. The compositions make use of transparency in different ways: things hidden and revealed create a tension between what is visible and what is not.

My training in the arts began in poetry, which continues to inform almost every aspect of my artistic process. Part of an ongoing series, the Poetic Grid paintings are semi-abstract collage compositions that are much like visual poems. Bands of color alternate with fields of collage; and meaning is created through the resonant conversations that occur between them. 

The materials I use are a mix of papers both random and meaningful that have been obscured with layers of paint: old shopping lists, vintage comics, book and magazine pages, printed papers, junk mail, my daughter’s early doodles, pieces of my husband’s works on paper, etc. (In the studio, nothing is safe.) Pulled from many places, these elements bring with them a sense of story. The wash of paint acts to join the disparate pieces and also to obscure their content, so that what remains is more of an impression or hint, asking the viewer to look more closely.

The collage elements while obscured hint at different narratives: Cry, Cry, Cry and Cry Me a River focus on the emotional drama of 1970s romance comics; Habitat I and II touch on environmental issues featuring extinct birds from Audubon’s Birds of North America; and the moon paintings resulted from studio explorations where I found different moon shapes in the pages of junk mail catalogues.