Artist's Statement

​​Whether working in thread, pen or tape, I investigate line.  The relationship between a solid line, an ephemeral shadow, or a block of colour.  Each has a relationship to its neighbour and the surface it inhabits, and it is that connectivity that I play with.  I work instinctively. I take ideas that please or intrigue me and play with them, and with each mark I become more subsumed into the piece, distracted from the everyday allowing a calming of the mind and a steady hand and soul.  Whilst most of my current work is created over hours, days and weeks, a few are quickly produced and as quickly discarded.  

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Currently working in thread through recovery, the threads have taken more direction.  Each piece has a line to hold onto or or a line to recover and rediscover.  

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Creating sometimes short-lived site specific installations, I react to my surroundings, whether it is architecture or an atmosphere.  The tape spreads over walls and floors, creating a vista with added anamorphic elements requiring viewer participation.   As quickly as these sometimes performative installations are conceived they are destroyed with both creation and destruction becoming part of the ephemerality of the artwork. 

Each pen and ink piece is a meditation.  Instinctively I make the lines and a theme continues into a series, staying within the rules of the initial work.  Creating rules, however simple, allows development and a possible conclusion but what the outcome will be is only known when an outcome is reached.  Only working in black and sepia ink, pen gives me a freedom to explore and experiment in depth, rhythm and movement.

The thread work of recent years gives lines fresh energy, created within my own rules of pattern, direction, shade.  Using both line and geometric shape in cotton and wool, the canvas becomes not merely a backing but an integral part of the work introducing grid patterns the thread can either work with or against.   

There is no deep message within my practice; there very rarely has been.  Lines takes me somewhere else, physically and metaphysically, leaving a few traces behind me.

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Jan Harrington

September 2022

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