Kerry Harding

Kerry Harding is an experimental oil painter who views the rugged coastline of North Cornwall through the lens of modern romanticism. Through constant observation of the landscape that wraps around her life, throughout the seasons and over many years, she has developed an intimate understanding of the living history of a place that continues to surprise and inspire her every day. Moving beyond the traditions of landscape painting, Harding’s works communicate this deeper connection to her surroundings, simultaneously capturing the viewer’s imagination with their immediate beauty and rewarding those who pay attention long enough to understand the many layers that have contributed to their formation.

Central to Harding’s practice is her process of reusing canvases, some several years old, which bear the scars of being stripped and layered with paint numerous times. Examining the existing markings on a canvas, the artist will rotate, flip or resize the fabric until she finds the starting point for a new work; something that connects with a memory of the landscape onto which she applies new markings and layers to the canvas directly. Centuries of weathering and erosion that have formed, and continue to shape, the Atlantic coastline are mirrored in the artist’s working and reworking of the canvas, giving her paintings a history and authenticity of their own.

In Harding’s works, seemingly familiar scenes are distorted, their elements manipulated such that they cannot be pinpointed in reality. Playing with perspective, experimental sections of the canvas sit alongside those painted with photorealistic precision - the way the sunlight hits the canopy of a tree, the sense of movement within a mackerel sky, the way a gentle wind casts ripples through the sea - bringing the fleeting nature of the landscape’s beauty into focus. Feeling a kinship to the romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, the hyperrealism of Gerhard Richter, the optical illusions of Bridget Riley and vivid poetry of Emily Dickinson, Harding deliberately accentuates the elements of natural beauty that can be found through close and prolonged examination of our surroundings and, ultimately, her works encourage the viewer to be cognisant of their own fleeting presence in the world.

Harding holds a BA in Fine Art from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (1991-94) and an MA in painting from Falmouth University (2000-03). She has been exhibited widely across the UK and internationally. Born in 1972, she lived in London and Cape Town before moving to Cornwall in 2007, where she lives with her husband and two children.