KERRY HARDING: EDGE OF DAY
CANDIDA STEVENS, CHICHESTER
UNTIL JULY 8
Kerry Harding lives in Cornwall, and the Cornish landscape is the subject of her work.
Kerry Harding
“The skies, footpaths, trees and seas I see again and again day after day. These are the motifs I repeat, rework, destroy and process.”
She paints that landscape ‘at the edge of day’, at dawn or dusk, when it is backlit by the sun’s eager flames, or its fading embers.
Often she paints over her work, and starts anew, sometimes many times, so the canvas – like the landscape that inspires it – becomes a palimpsest of past and present.
“The manipulation of paint and the subtle surprises achieved through a cycle of putting on and taking off is what facilitates my surreal recreation of a place. Half remembered, half imagined, familiar places.”
Her skies are often rich and colourful, with shoals of plump, almost tangible clouds. The land and sea tend to be more bleached out, ethereal, impermanent. This is layered work.
The paintings’ titles are equally poetic, often gleaned from the verse of Emily Dickinson. There are clear visual influences, too. You can’t help but think of Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime Landschaften, or Gerhard Richter’s subversive 1960s mountainscapes. Harding might be described as a ‘Contemporary Romantic’, a refreshing antidote to post-modernism. The pendulum is swinging.
Thirty of her paintings are currently on show at Candida Stevens Gallery, five minutes’ walk from Pallant House Gallery, and its fine Glyn Philpot exhibition. Candida Stevens will also be displaying a selection of Harding’s work, as well as that of several other female artists, at the British Art Fair.