Kerry Harding

“The fields, footpaths, horizons, trees and seas I see again and again day after day. These are the motifs I repeat, rework, destroy and process. 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.” Cornwall-based artist Kerry Harding studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and at Oxford University before going on to complete an MA. Kerry has taught at the prestigious St Ives School of Painting and her work is shown internationally.

Kerry Harding’s landscape paintings are concerned with experience beyond the ordinary. In her practice, she relies entirely on process and the manipulation of paint, working and reworking the canvas in an almost unconscious manner until that moment of enlightenment, that sublime moment of sensory response to abstract shape and colour, when the emerging image asserts its own meaning and direction on the artist. Paralleling, in some ways, the traditions of Romanticism, Harding’s images dismiss any picturesque ideas of the landscape in favour of creating a deeper connection with the viewer. Whilst the landscape around her home inspires her work, she seeks to take us from the familiar to the indefinite, playing with perspective and space in order to achieve some sense of ‘other’ or the sensorially weird.