Kirsty’s 1st miniature drawing in silverpoint on gesso – Study of a skull 1 (Patagonia)
Kirsty Harris Get Your Art On FAD #48 More Info: kirstyharrisart.wordpress.com/
You can also submit your work for inclusion on FAD just use our Facebook Page to submit it. Please add info about your work and about yourself Good Luck !
I make work stretching a wide range of media – large un-stretched oil paintings on linen, household bleach on paper, oil on glass, interactive audio works, cyanotypes, short films, ceramics and silverpoint drawings on oak blocks – all based around the imagery and data collected on the atom bomb.
My un-stretched paintings on linen, depicting nuclear tests, are vast and confrontational. Moments of manufactured violence radically disrupt the desert landscape. In Charlie (2017) 112 x 69″ each square inch of linen represents 4 tons of TNT – which in turn is the unit of measurement that denotes the yield of the explosion.
My glass paintings and delicate silverpoint drawings aim for a quiet sense of unease, to harness the beauty and fragility of the chosen medium, capturing ginormous, fleeting moments of history in a consuming and meticulous manner.
I make cyanotypes after an old photographic process discovered in 1842 appropriating negatives from my silverpoint drawings and paintings. I mix up the chemicals, paint them onto the paper and then expose the image under the sun; the largest example of thermonuclear fusion in our solar system.
To further mine the psychological threat these nuclear tests still hold I started an ongoing audio piece in 2013: How I Learned to Stop Worrying (1945-2023) was created in conjunction with a group of musicians. The composition is a musical account of every officially recorded nuclear explosion detonated between 1945 and the present day. With over 2000 explosions, each different instrument represents a country that partook, each month in history lasts a second on the recording and each note depicts a single bomb.
This work is shown in different scenarios including the piece ‘Cold Call, 2019’ –
A 1950s rotary telephone rings intermittently and when answered plays the audio piece Cold Call (How I Learned to Stop Worrying 1945-2019). The piece passes through periods of relative calm building up through chaotic peaks of activity and back down again.
Moments from a Chinese government’s propaganda film are isolated in my framed works on paper. Here bleach is used as an oxidising agent, the mark making eradicating the colour and only becoming fully visible minutes after the brush has left the paper. Inside a plinth the miniature projection entitled The Victim, shows a decommissioned Yak-11 endlessly turning like a trapped animal in the desolate landscape of the Lop Nur Desert. Its parts are picked off chaotically by the forces from the blast wave.
I was born in 1978 in Nottinghamshire and raised in Yorkshire. I live and work in London, graduating from the Sir John Cass School of Art, in 2002.
