Clarissa Harrington

Clarissa has graduated from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth with a first class honours degree. Her work mainly consists of experimental mark making exercises using photographic paper as a canvas for different light sources. A lengthy process involving many hundreds of discarded images produces the photographs you see on this website.

The main focus of the majority of this work is to create photography that is completely self-referrential. The viewer can look at these minimalist images and hopefuly engage with them on an aesthetic level without quite knowing how they are made. The colours are used to help subvert the opinion that something minmalist must be mostly a background of 'white'.

As a society we are so submersed in imagery at every point in our daily lives that it should be a releif to view such abstract work without any intention of making it a window into another world, or straining to see meaning behind every stroke or tone. The eye is encouraged to wander over this 2D plane, and not to become lost in diminuitive detail.

 

Surface Tension

This series produced for exhibition is about transcending the borderline between photograph and picture. It uses camera-less photography to challenge the perception of photography versus painting. The viewer is encouraged to interpret this work in any way they choose; therefore information about the creation of these images is minimal. The painting of each work is an expressive mark making process that represents a minimalist approach to modernist painting and subverts the usual photographic frame and methods of composition.

Life's A Beach

The images exhibited here are of unnatural beach scenes. They deal with the uncanny in a minimal way. The limited tones enhance the simple quality of an abstract painting, and the skewed angle of view encourages the viewer to reinterpret their own ideals and expectations.