Rebecca Harper

Rebecca Harper is an artist, living and working in London. Here she speaks to Lynn Seraina Battaglia via email about her current exhibition, figurative painting and her avatar…

LSB: Hi Rebecca, thank you for taking time to 'talk' with me.
In your works, you use people that you know and make them into characters in the paintings, where they take on a role not unlike characters in a play. By turning the people that are familiar to you into generic characters, you allow for the audience to place their own experiences onto them. Maybe even like in a dream where we recognize people more based on feelings and not by their visual appearances. Can you tell me more about this?

RH: That's right. Most characters inhabit someone I know, or a combination of figures I know, love, admire, so there is a particular familiarity, and yet they remain also completely anonymous to me. Often certain polarities drive the decisions in my figures, strength, and vulnerability, a knowing and unknowing of others and the self that I’m seeking to feel. I’m always looking for something inherently about the human psyche and more recently something much more spirit like.

LSB: I've already mentioned the word 'play'. Your works are always curious worlds with a lot of narrative for me. Like we probably picked up in the first question already, the audience will have their own association with the characters. Simultaneously, that also means that they might propose their own narrative onto your works. How important is it for you that people understand your intended narrative?

RH: I am certainly trying to inhabit a stage, in the way that there is always an awareness of the way things are framed along with a shifting dialogue between film stills, photography, moments in theatre, painting and drawing, which are all interconnected through that telling of a story.

When I’m making a new body of work; the characters and the narrative elements unfold and wonder organically between my paintings more like film with intermittent gaps between stills. The characters move around, locating various moments that manifest as either a reflection of my physical environment or a mix of that and the psychological locations that I inhabit and those of which that inhabit me.

I’m not trying to dictate a narrative that all unfolds within one image like early renaissance painters would where there may be different locations or periods of time happening at once, they are more like single scenes in sequences unleashing fictive realities, almost like reality tv.

Some recent paintings are looking directly at the viewer, and because they are confronted, they do ask the viewer to interact and to feel that interaction and emotion. I feel I’m only responsible for my own figures and not the viewers. People will always interpret from their own viewpoint and that's how it should be.

LSB: In your paintings, water plays a significant role. To what extent are you subverting the standard symbolism of water?

RH: If my paintings were film stills, then water is the main location on the set where all the characters gather and act out. The water is a particular part of the river in Old Isleworth next to a little nature reserve island called the Isleworth Ait which interestingly Turner painted sketchbooks of studies in all its weathers from his boat. This is the location that I grew up next too and that I locked down in with my fiancé and family.

The symbolism of home is important in the context of my latest paintings as I have experienced many turbulent and challenging emotional changes and like many experienced various significant types of loss and grief within my own family, at a time where we have all lost the world as we knew it to be. There was something for me about the reoccurring image of water continuing to flow- no matter what challenges it faces, it's a driving force in everything it does, and it keeps going. It’s always been present. However- whilst its essential to life it had the ability to drown.

Leonardo da Vinci like the Chinese philosophy of the Tao believed that ‘water is the driving force of nature’. The life in us is much like the water in the river. So, for me it became a way of talking about the alignment of my inner and outer world more seamlessly, a reminder that like water we have some of that strength.

The symbolism of Identity became important when thinking about transformation and healing, but also in Judaism’s tradition of immersion and cleansing of spirits at significant points in the female menstrual cycle.

LSB: The works in your current exhibition at Anima Mundi were all painted in the last 1.5 years, which were marked by the pandemic, isolation, and a collective feeling of confusion. What role/importance do you give art and especially, narrative, figurative painting, in dealing with these events that we experienced collectively?

RH: The creative force fuels the perseverance necessary to make things of beauty, horror, humour, daring and substance and helps the world to see things afresh again. Artists have the magic ability to maintain a particular state of ‘being’ in a work.

Certainly, within my practice painting and psychology are inextricably linked.

The collective trauma of survival and threat has drastically altered the fabric of society through horrific loss and crisis of meaning, which no doubt has transformed our collective memory, and creates a system that allows us to redefine who we all are and where we are all going. I’ve often been aware of the weight of the Holocaust and its collective trauma attached through my own history and cultural identity, and how that can manifest within my own practice.

Of course, we need to make sense of it all, and humans have the innate ability to need to give meaning to our lives, and so we all construct it in various ways. A sense of belonging, self- continuity, connection between the self, others, and the environment.

There are a lot of incredibly vital works of art right now which have a universal expression of feeling. I’ve never seen so many images of hands appearing, the significance of physicality and touch has shifted so much as has our interpretation of it. Figuration is a way to aid context, revitalise, reconstruct, describe, challenge, connect, an outlet for personal tragedy, a way to tell our individual and collective circumstances, a way to give light and/or weight to pin down our truth and beliefs perhaps.

LSB: In your new works we find a blond woman. She is very present, the centre of every work, the main protagonist - and she is your avatar. If, in fact, she is an avatar of yourself, is she representing a growth in your own confidence in your works? How autobiographical is it?

RH: It is autobiographical.

She is more spirit than human, she’s aware of the cycles of life, she’s perhaps the embodiment of everything that is, a stronger version of myself weaved into the home environment that's she feels she belongs, she is ghostlike, but reliable and turns up repeatedly when Iv needed to sit with her.

LSB: Thank you so much for taking time!

The Waters of Dwelling is on view at Anima Mundi, St. Ives until September 4, 2021.