Western Morning News (Saturday)
Dive in to art set in the Waters of Dwelling
Rebecca Harper’s exhibition is colourful, thoughtful and touching, says FRANK RUHRMUND
Those who recall Rebecca Harper’s debut exhibition Chameleon, which filled all three floors of the Anima Mundi gallery in St Ives a couple of years ago, will know how big, bold and beguiling her paintings can be, and will be prepared for something special from her with her current exhibition The Waters of Dwelling.
They will not be disappointed. If anything she makes an even bigger bang with her second solo show here than she did with her first. An artist who was born in London and whose childhood home was located on the water’s edge of the Thames, the river has long been a symbol for much that she does, but in a wider sense, as the exhibition title suggests, it also carries wider and deeper references for her. As she says, the ritualistic nature of water helps to cleanse, heal, and purefy, and as a result it connects us to ourselves, to others, to life itself and is a great unifying element.
An artist who studied at UWE, Bristol, the Royal Drawing School, and is a postgraduate of Turps Art School, drawing is of importance to her. In recent years through the Royal Drawing School she has taught at a number of institutions from the National Gallery to the Saatchi Gallery, and has given artist talks to Camberwell College of Art at the South London Gallery, where she is an associate lecturer for UWE Bristol. An award-winning artist, artist in residence for the Ryder Project Space at A.P.T. Deptford, she has also been a recipient of the ACS (Artists Collecting Society) studio prize, and was selected as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 at South London Gallery, and for the John Moore’s painting prize 2021.
Talking about her pictures in this exhibition that are as electrifying as they are enigmatic and engrossing, Rebecca Harper confesses candidly: “As many people have, I’ve been dealing with various types of fear and loss in my life lately, consequently I’ve been reflecting and viewing the world in a way I hadn’t previously done. Made primarily during lockdown, this body of work became much more introspective as our worlds grew smaller. Through loss and grief the search for meaning and the need for solace grew greater than ever. A profound need for physical and emotional connection, not just to one another but also to the natural world became all the more significant.”
Eros, the Roman mythological god of love, plays an important part in her compositions, which, as it has been said, could be scenes from a stage play performed by a cast of familiar characters that rotate around the outskirts of her childhood riverside home where she has been isolated with her partner and members of her family. Paintings that, I can’t help thinking, Freud would have enjoyed, she portrays her characters not as portraits but rather like actors playing different roles. Together with the setting within which they they perform, they mirror
the areas in her mind that she inhabits and those that inhabit her. An artist who confesses to having been inspired, among others, by such masters as Uccello, Velazquez, Veronese, Schiele, Munch and Manet, in talking about her work, Rebecca Harper says how her characters and objects all have secondary meanings. “Recurring motifs are a way of thinking about colour and moving the eye around the image, they’re the reflectors of the sun hitting the water but are also about looking for something more spiritual. I’m a painter who feels out of place often, so I try to place it in the work to feel at home.”
Colourful and commanding, thoughtful and touching, and ultimately triumphant, admission is free, and the paintings that make up Rebecca Harper’s The Waters of Dwelling should not be missed. They can be seen in Anima Mundi. Street-an-Pol, St. Ives, until September 4.