Jane Harris, 1956-2022

For the past three decades, Jane Harris has been studying the geometric shape of the ellipse – an elastic shape that lends itself to allusion and can take on multiple identities. Drawn from models, the shapes are painted in different relationships with each other, in two or three colours. From these simple parameters, she is able to create images that remind us that the fundamental effects of any painting lie in the movement of light passing over a surface, which carries the substance of the "formed and transformed" material. His watercolor drawings express and are born from an intense engagement with the natural world and the phenomena that exist within it: the sun illuminating a cloud against the light, or the movement of the wind on the water, the grainy quality of twilight. Harris's elliptical forms have a kind of slippery ambiguity, and as she manipulates materials, she offers various possibilities as to how we perceive them. Oscillating between the non-figurative and the figurative, they can be understood as forms that appear flat on the surface of a medium while having an impression of recessionary depth.