‘Patterns of Reflection’ 2026

Throughout art history, artists who have been inspired by nature often find themselves
defined by their subject matter rather than their medium. John Constable, for example, is
described on Wikipedia as an “English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition” and Caspar
David Friedrich as a “German Romantic landscape painter ”. To define Kerry Harding as a
‘landscape painter’ would, however, be misleading. For her, the landscape functions as much as
medium as it does subject matter, a visual tool through which the artist explores the technical
possibilities of oil painting. Her work, as a result, traverses many genres, from romanticism to
the uncanny, from photorealism to the abstract. In short, Harding is not a landscape painter who
uses oil, she is an oil painter who uses the landscape.

Living alongside the same stretch of coast for over twenty years, Harding is in sync with
the cyclical nature of her environment. Following the continuous shift in the sun’s movements,
tidal times and weather, her life and routine are guided by the seasons; from planning surf times
and dog walks, to observing the shifting effects on the landscape that wraps around her, the
artist’s visual experience of the world’s unending repetition is reflected in her practice. Through
prolonged examination and repeated enquiry of these visual references, the artist has
developed a highly unique approach that allows her to break the landscape down into its
constituent parts and reassemble them in endlessly varied combinations.

In Harding’s latest series of paintings, this sense of repetition and reflection in nature is
brought into focus. Mirroring between sea and sky have long been features of her work, often
blurring the horizon and purposefully distorting the sense of reality on view, but in her new
paintings she delves deeper. Dividing scenes along the vertical, rather than horizontal, trees and
headlands mirror each other to create a new, distinct sense of distortion. Reminiscent of the
Rorschach inkblot psychology tests, the effect is such that the viewer is drawn further away from
recognition of the scene as a landscape and further into the sphere of abstraction and
dreamscapes. In doing so, we are encouraged to share the artist’s enjoyment of producing such
detailed sections of replication as an opportunity for meditation and self-reflection.

One of the most striking features along the coastline where Harding lives is the enduring
presence of its trees. It is the coastal conditions that have undoubtedly shaped these forms and
yet they stand resilient, their silhouettes acting as markers along the headland that both
punctuate and puncture the boundary between land and sky. In Harding’s latest work, the visual
impact of their curved trunks and windswept canopies are amplified by the mirroring of their
forms and the larger scale they occupy on the canvas. Cogniscant that trees are often used as a
visual metaphor for the artist themselves, Harding muses that there may indeed be an
autobiographical thread within her own work, a subconscious representation of her own,
deep-rooted, relationship with the landscape she lives within.

In creating works that do not attempt to replicate reality, Harding brings us closer to how
she draws inspiration from nature; the shapes and silhouettes found within the landscape, how
they interact with each other, how they replicate throughout nature and the patterns they form,
are endlessly faschinating to the artist. It is remarkable that the same visual cues and box of
photographic references to this landscape have sustained the artist’s visual inspiration for so
long, but it is precisely this radical approach to the use of the landscape that has allowed the
artist to reach this point in her career and continues to drive her creatively. Honing in on her
interest in pattern and the artistic opportunities to slow a painting’s creation down through
detailed replication of forms, combined with her established technique of repurposing older
paintings and application of solvent to create expressive sections of canvas, Harding’s latest
body of work demonstrates the enduring creative power of her practice.

Isabella Joughin, April 2026

‘Overview’ 2025

Kerry Harding is a painter who views the rugged coastline of North Cornwall through the lens of modern romanticism. Through constant observation of the landscape that wraps around her life, throughout the seasons and over many years, she has developed an intimate understanding of the living history of a place that continues to surprise and inspire her every day. Moving beyond the traditions of landscape painting, Harding’s works communicate this deeper connection to her surroundings, simultaneously capturing the viewer’s imagination with their immediate beauty and rewarding those who pay attention long enough to understand the many layers that have contributed to their formation.

Central to Harding’s practice is her process of reusing canvases, some several years old, which bear the scars of being stripped and layered with paint numerous times. Examining the existing markings on a canvas, the artist will rotate, flip or resize the fabric until she finds the starting point for a new work; something that connects with a memory of the landscape onto which she applies new markings and layers to the canvas directly. Centuries of weathering and erosion that have formed, and continue to shape, the Atlantic coastline are mirrored in the artist’s working and reworking of the canvas, giving her paintings a history and authenticity of their own.

In Harding’s works, seemingly familiar scenes are distorted, their elements manipulated such that they cannot be pinpointed in reality. Playing with perspective, experimental sections of the canvas sit alongside those painted with photorealistic precision – the way the sunlight hits the canopy of a tree, the sense of movement within a mackerel sky, the way a gentle wind casts ripples through the sea – bringing the fleeting nature of the landscape’s beauty into focus. Feeling a kinship to the romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, the hyperrealism of Gerhard Richter, the optical illusions of Bridget Riley and vivid poetry of Emily Dickinson, Harding deliberately accentuates the elements of natural beauty that can be found through close and prolonged examination of our surroundings and, ultimately, her works encourage the viewer to be cognisant of their own fleeting presence in the world.

Harding holds a BA in Fine Art from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (1991-94) and an MA in painting from Falmouth University (2000-03). She has been exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, most recently represented by Candida Stevens Gallery.. Born in 1972, she lived in London and Cape Town before moving to Cornwall in 2008, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Isabella Joughin, Curator