Luce Gallery is proud to present the second Solo Exhibition at the Gallery by Connie Harrison.

In Wanderings, large-scale panels invite viewers to immerse themselves in her visual realm, while also magnifying tiny details from the more-than-human world beyond the recognisable. Her work touches on both the power and the fragility of the environment, speaking to a sense of nature as simultaneously allencompassing and vulnerable, and inviting a reassessment of the complex relationships between self and other, person and place, and abstraction and figuration.

Harrison begins each composition with a base layer of a bright colour, which will sing through the subsequent layers. She then adds a layer of clear wax before painting in a linear representation of her first compositional element, which is generally the form of a leaf of flower, a tiny detail of a landscape magnified to fill the picture plane. After another layer of wax, she adds a contrasting composition which intersects with the first, spatially segmenting the canvas with two images that together dissolve into near-abstraction.

She then begins to add layers of paint using pointillist or impressionistic brush techniques, often in earthier or more autumnal colours. This muddies or grounds the original fresh base shade, which nevertheless continues to shine through vibrantly like light wherever she scrapes back into the surface, which she does with a scalpel between coats of paint. There is an ongoing process of covering and uncovering at work in which colour plays a key role, turning the complex composition into a multiplicitous and yet harmonious set of relations.

Harrison’s process has sculptural elements to it, particularly where she scores back into the paint to reveal underlying lines and colours, anchoring and unifying the work. She sees herself as carving a wandering path through her painterly surfaces, seeking a route among the textures and hues of the image. This is echoed in the experience of viewing the work, in which the eye is led into the expanse of the picture plane and taken on a journey in many directions at once, replete with shortcuts, dead-ends, and re-emergences. Throughout these prismatic paintings, there is an elision of the distance between foreground and background, playing with the traditional spatial rules of painting, unfolding into multifaceted organic geometries. Despite being landscape-like, the works eschew a horizon line or central vanishing point, eluding definitions of scale; these could be close-ups of a garden border or views of the earth from far above, as romantically intimate as they are distantly topographical.

These paintings require extended looking; details and relationships emerge they longer they are observed. Harrison is interested in inviting viewers to consider alternative viewpoints, something that is echoed in her own process of turning the works upside down during her painting process in order to gain a different perspective on the composition. There is a tension at play within this body of work, between light and dark, foreground and background, vibrancy and quiet; constantly unfolding into further complexity, her dynamic paintings have an ungraspable quality, as though hovering just out of reach between figuration and abstraction.

Bio‍

Connie Harrison (b. 1993, UK) is a British artist who lives and works in London.

She graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2016, after completing a Foundation course at New College Nottingham.

Recent exhibitions include Strata Nino Mier Gallery New York, 2025, Fifteen Years Luce Gallery, Turin, 2024, Phantasmagoria IBF Contemporary London, 2024, New Now Guts Gallery London, 2024, Bloomscapes Luce Gallery Turin, 2024, and Reverdie Arusha Gallery Edinburgh, 2023.

Wanderings marks her second solo exhibition with the Gallery.

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