A Wilder Place

4 April 2018 - 28 April 2018

Claire Harkess has all the expressive and technical gifts essential for the wildlife painter and her powers of observation and recollection are given full reign in her latest exhibition. But as the title suggests in A Wilder Place she accesses past, present and future; the shared, romantic idea of our country once fully inhabited by ancient lineages of wild animals; the reality of the survivors we have seen or at least know are alive in remote vastnesses and the possibility of the return of lynx, wolf, boar and bear in the visionary rewilding programmes in which she has become involved.

In a Harkess painting the animal is real, as experienced; a silhouette, camouflage patterns against patterned background foliage, seldom the whole animal but always its whole spirit. She has engaged with the ecology of the animal’s histories, once inextricably linked to our own, ritually recorded by our Neolithic ancestors on cave walls, brilliantly realised in her Regeneration series. In other paintings like The Eagle and the Wren she draws on the folk tales of the Highlands to add poetry to her subject. The deft certainty of her mark has an oriental sensibility whether framing the forest presence of the wild boar or the etiolated delicacy of a pair of common cranes. The value of these animals is in their ecology and also in their presence, often just a trace, their very wildness and inaccessibility defining their value, and it is this trace which is so poignantly and beautifully encapsulated by the artist.

 

Born: 1970
Place of Birth: Ayr

Claire Harkess was born in Ayr, Scotland, graduating from Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s. In recent years her painting has taken her to fragile lands to study and interpret life on the edge. Antarctica, Outback Australia and St Kilda are all places where, in such extreme environments, survival is difficult and the balance of life is delicate. Six hundred miles due west of Ecuador surrounded by the Pacific Ocean lie the Galápagos Islands, made famous by Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of the Species’. This isolated volcanic outpost remained relatively untouched by man, evolving to become one of the World’s unique ecosystems. The balance present in nature is clearly communicated through the paintings. Painting in watercolour offers a unique directness; the essential qualities of light and energy present in the natural world are the very essence of the medium itself. The delicacy of her palette and oriental economy of her mark-making creates a subtle tension representing a world that is ‘holding still’, giving a sense of freedom, spirit, time and place.

Claire exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in April 2018, exploring the idea of A Wilder Place. In July 2020 Claire presented an exhibition Into the Wild, featuring works created in the Arctic Circle and rewilding centres in Scotland. In March 2022 Claire’s exhibition The Garden, opened in The Gallery. The exhibition explored her immediate surroundings in Perth from a collection of borrowed gardens. Claire carefully and joyfully captured the visitors: the birds, the squirrels, the badger, and for the first time she brought the flora to the foreground while a butterfly or a tiny snail might be found in the detail. This close-up of the familiar natural world, so easily overlooked, has expanded her practice. Her work has a delicate, oriental sensibility, suiting longer formats, and employing kintsugi techniques, adding to their sense of fragility.

‘I return again and again to wildlife and the natural world. It surprises and inspires. No two encounters are the same. Being present in something greater gives perspective. There is always something new to learn. It is an anchor that holds all of us and it must be protected.’ – Claire Harkess

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