Claire Harvey

I am so sorry that I killed you When you came to me last night I watched you enter through the window You were heading for the light

Claire Harvey wrote the song ‘Sorry’ after a fly appeared in her studio and embarked on what turned out to be its last journey into a still wet canvas. In a very real sense, the fly was captured in paint. The song commemorating the fly’s demise is part of Harvey’s second solo exhibition at STORE, along with a number of paintings and an installation of paintings on easily removable scotch tape.

Yet, the song is more than simply part of the exhibition - the song’s lyrics about the capture of the fly within the viscosity of oil paint are a persuasive metaphor for Harvey’s working method as a whole. Her works often feature lone figures engaged in solitary pursuits – a man prudently sniffs cheese at a supermarket counter, another is involved in a suspicious-looking act of hauling an inert body up or down over a ledge, a third is working intently on what looks like a floor arrangement. The installation, ‘Easily Removable’, features solitary characters walking with their backs turned to us whilst sunk in thought.

In nearly all of her new works the figures hide their faces from the viewer’s gaze, sometimes by circumstance, at other times by deliberately shielding themselves. Immersed in private moments, it seems that all these characters have been inadvertently caught – captured on canvas, or on transparencies, or previously on post-it notes and shadow installations – just at the moment before they disappear back into their own lives. Each work then, can be read as a moment of capture that preserves the everyday and often slightly absurd experiences that are usually forgotten about, but that in retrospect add up to the greater part of our lives.

You were so fast and so confident When I saw you around the room For you had the wings but I had the brush Now the oil sealed your doom

Extracts from ‘Sorry’, Claire Harvey 2006

Pressetext

Claire Harvey
Some Pictures and a Song