Over a period of months, Harris applies sand to her canvases by the fistful, building up layers of sedimentation, then scraping and sanding the surface down. Like dust settling, the works come to rest in a weathered, lithic state. Repeating this process, Harris explores erosion through her compositions, reflecting the geological forces that are both seen and unseen in our environment. Sand is the optimal material for this reflection: the end product of millions of years of erosion, sand invokes a history of lived experience, and particularly ties to the artist’s Caribbean and Cuban heritage. Harris’s symbiotic relationship with this material, in which history and experience persist through physical remnants, can be linked to Anselm Kiefer’s symbolic use of materials — considering debris not only to build layers, but to explore conceptual themes. Heavily encumbered, Harris’s choice of material is weighty, imbuing her canvases with memory-bearing matter and mimicking the pockets and folds of our intricate geological landscapes.

Selected Works (12 images)

Within Ossified, earth tones turn fleshy and chemical, shifting Harris’s focus from green landscapes to bones and minerals. The artist gravitates toward this palette of mineralisation in Lossless Compression; while natural, the work reflects architectural structures: sturdy, yet susceptible to collapse. Artificial colours and tones are embedded in the canvas, showing up subtly as orange and yellow gestures that reflect the chaos of natural elements. The architectural force of Lossless Compression stratifies the work, balancing the compositional tension of the heavy surface and bright colours.

The bright blue gesture in Rift forges a disrupting path across the surface of the canvas, deconstructing and reshaping the composition. Inspired by the intrinsic mark making of Franz Kline, in Rift, Harris applies the visceral and violent nature of the elements to the canvas. The most idyllic scenes in nature — hills, waterfalls, streams — emerge beautifully because they undergo this ruthless transformation, erosion and decay. Harris considers Ruth Allen’s book Weathering, a work that reframes our lives as landscapes and the forces that weather us: grief, death and transformation, as integral to the human condition. Like the currents that push and pull apart the Earth, the human experience is subject to the cyclical forces of loss and change.

To render this process, Harris constructs her paintings slowly; within this gradual build-up of paint, memories are buried, rising and falling actions are repeated and surfaces erode to the point of unrecognition. Harris’s works confront this embedded process of weathering, not to study its outcome, but to ask: have we weathered well? Undo reflects the lived experience of time as it applies to the natural world — not necessarily good or bad, but worn.