Rebecca Harper

From the moment I hugged Rebecca hello at the gate behind which the APT Gallery and APT studios hide in Deptford I was hooked. We walked up a maze of stairs and hallways until we arrived in her studio, filled with large canvases and drawings and watercolours. Some of the works were packed up and ready to go to Cornwall for her upcoming solo show at Anima Mundi (coincidentally, it opens tonight). Giving her a little sanctum to produce enough work for her solo show, Rebecca got the studio after she graduated from Turps Art School last year and being able to have the space and time to shut the door and examine how her work sits next to each other and converses has been beneficial to understanding the relationships between them.

Side note: if you’ve followed my studio visits, you will have noticed by now how Deptford is a recurring theme for visits - and I swear it’s not because I live close by.

There is no place to start but at the literal beginning of this studio visit. Rebecca’s work is chronological like that, but later cut into pieces and she produces her own temporality. But I’m getting ahead (a glitch?!). We start with sketches. I cannot remember the last time I was presented with such an extensive collection of real-life drawings. One book, one place. The drawings are observations of the world, of particular people at a particular time in a particular space. But that matters only as far as it positions them as documentary social commentary. The reality is that they are less truthful. Rebecca shows me a page where several sheets of paper are fixed together, making the book into a playful and witty fold-out/pop-up diary: the drawings serve as memories. The pages don’t fold out because it seemed like a fun addition, but it was almost a forceful necessity with the purpose of not being limited by the borders of the book’s pages. Rebecca sees the drawings as a way of being in the world. She is fully immersed in the experience of a place and time and the situation expands on her pages however it needs to. These drawings do not serve as sketches for the paintings directly, even though some faces might seem familiar - they seem familiar because they are!

Back in the studio, Rebecca takes inspiration from what she captured outside in the ‘real world’ and thinks about compositions. Drawing from life is a very important part of her work because she realises things in behaviour and individuals that she might forget about in the studio where it the ‘real’ becomes theory and hypothesis. Once she’s in the studio, her process starts again with sketches, rooting the process of how her works become in her practice. The initial drawings will never become a painting like for like - they are catalysts more than anything. As much as there is an abundance of drawings in Rebecca's studio, so are there watercolour sketches. These come closer to what we’d traditionally think of as studies for a painting. And if the vibrant colours in the paintings hadn’t drawn me towards them with such a force, me looking through dozens, if not hundreds of watercolour studies could have been how this visit ended.

The unstretched canvas (on the roll still) is fixed to the wall and Rebecca starts with a drawing. Even in the finished paintings the under-drawing sits like a thread in it. It’s drawn and re-drawn quickly and the paint later adds but another tool to figuring out the figures and landscapes. The graphite lines are NOT erased at any time and the paintings become, or rather ARE drawings still. Once the under-drawing is done, the work moves from the vertical to the floor and Rebecca immerses herself in the painting completely. The women and men in her paintings usually appear as a group, yet detached from each other and alone. They seem familiar. Even to me. But mainly they are familiar to Rebecca. Not because she knows exactly who they are - she doesn’t try to fully know them. But in her process faces morph and she only stops when a face seems familiar to her, like she could know the person. Then they are ready to inhabit her fantastic world of paintings. We talk about ‘painting-hopping’ - like a tourist attraction, but fictional. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day one of the figures uses their potential to hop into another painting and adapt and we wouldn’t even notice - like a chameleon (could that be a hint to the exhibition title?!). Rebecca consciously plays with that notion and addresses assumptions and how we might look at people differently, depending on the space that they are in.

We move around several of the large paintings in the space because there are rows of other paintings behind each and I cannot stop wanting to explore. ‘Hanging on a scaffold’ is one of very few works with only men on them. It’s a small group of four men sitting and standing on scaffolding that only on a second look reveals itself as that. The scaffolding is arranged in a way that also reminds of the Union Jack. The painting is somehow reminiscent of the 90s, but in a way that is the current revival of it, told by a 90s kid. The men might be people she once knew back when, but they are very much in the now. They linger, as a group, each by themselves, and Rebecca describes the sentiment as a very contemporary lingering. It’s the contemporary of Brexit. It’s the feeling of everything being on hold. Her works strike me as very British and this sends us down another discussion. I think the sentiment and the landscape of her works awaken a nostalgia for Britain in me. And there’s a truth in that because Rebecca paints from what she knows, what she’s observed and she is in Britain. But while the landscapes inhabit British qualities, they could be anywhere else almost as effortlessly. It’s this play between the familiar and the feeling of displacement that runs like a red thread through her oeuvre.

Two paintings show groups of women (two’s a group, three’s a party?!) sitting and moving on rocks next to water. Again, it feels like a British landscape, but I can’t put my finger on it - I am right in this case, but I’m going to let you make up your own mind and not tell. But some of the colours are popping, unlike for Britain. For the first time we talk about two- versus three-dimensionality and Rebecca tells me how she found that London doesn’t have many shadows. It’s very flat. And when she put it in perspective with the lights and shadows one might find in Greece I immediately understood: vividly dancing shadows, adding high contrasts to everything. The drama. The three-dimensionality. In that respect her paintings are not only British, they are London. And actually, Rebecca says she feels more connected to London than to the UK.

There is a level of escapism in her paintings and the popping colour acts as an emotive that pulls them back into the here and now. In its two-dimensionality, the landscape works like a stage set. The figures seem to be capable of travelling through the different layers of the painting and become actors in it, rather than just reacting to their surroundings. But even in this flatness, the movement of the figures within and through it make total sense. Where there is NO rock to climb on, I know exactly how the women are moving and climbing on this rock.

Her works have become quicker in recent months. She works with raw canvas and the paint reacts like watercolour on it. You lose the idea of the brushstroke when the colour bleeds on the canvas. The less paint she uses, the less layers, the more the works emit light. But that also makes the works one-hit wonders. There is no redo, no cover-up. At the same time, they become more playful, spontaneous and of the moment. Most of the works are very large in scale and the figures on them are life-sized. (I checked by measuring my shin to one of the woman I found most intimidating in all of the paintings and I feel like I know her from somewhere). Social platforms like Instagram and even Tinder definitely have influenced her work in the way that they make us familiar with faces of people we don’t actually know. They have influenced the way we think about images and it blurs into the faces that are familiar to Rebecca.

Rebecca tells me that she’d be very interested in examining how and whether the paintings themselves could become part of a larger collage. What if she cut up pieces of one canvas and stitched it together with another one? What if these two worlds met? Would the people in them know each other or be strangers? Having spent an hour with Rebecca in her studio, I am sure it would be familiar but not quite. They would find themselves in new groups, new settings, but still not able to escape themselves and their isolation.