Claire Harrison is an artist who mainly works with painting. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, Harrison makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, she makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented.
Harrison’s work allows the viewer to be confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position in a world of War, Terrorism and Violence. Her works are an investigation into representations of what she believes ‘war’ to be from a civillians perspective. This area of interest arose from her own idea that nothing can ever truly be known outside ones own experience. Harrison is interested in the idea of desensitisation and how ironically, death is thrust in ones face almost every day through the media so much so that it has lost the power to move us. Media images can decontextualize historical events and freeze the reality of war, distancing the viewer from the important moral issues. Challenging this idea, Harrison hopes to demonstrate how art that depicts war can raise questions at our very core whilst making powerful statements about humanity.
“Art can be used to describe emotion but it can also evoke emotion something that dry facts or figures rarely do”
Claire Harrison currently lives and works in York.
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