‘Kitty?’ I look up as a tangle of bags and oversized knitwear pulls up outside the studio on a bike. I’m back at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation in Covent Garden, this time to see painter and printmaker Harriet Gillett. 

 

It’s a little after 10am and we are the first ones here. After a brief fumble with the lights (Harriet’s) and a little stumble down the darkened stairs (mine), we push aside a piece of canvas strung between two walls and enter a spacious nook. Paintings are stacked around the parameter of the space, interspersed with drawings and preparatory studies stuck to the white walls. Luminous with their sunset palettes, the paintings glow under the bright strip lighting above, giving the studio a cocoon-like feel.

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‘Tea? Coffee?’ Harriet asks, before undertaking the elaborate choreography of moving between her studio and another nearby space where a kettle is precariously positioned near the floor. 'Any milk?' she shouts across the canvas divide. I decline as I wander around her studio.

 

There’s stuff everywhere. I tiptoe between the loose stretcher bars strewn across the floor to reach a kitsch golden trolley laden with piles of half-squeezed tubes of paint. I cast my eyes over a table, the surface of which has become a giant palette. Nearby, differently sized paint brushes are crammed into jars of water to soak, while crumpled tissues smeared with paint bear the evidence of her painting activities. It’s like being a child in a sweet shop except that, instead of sugary confectionery, it’s the stuff of artmaking that’s on display.

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‘Sorry,’ she apologises, pushing past the canvas doorway with a cup of coffee in each hand. ‘I’m starting a residency in Italy next week, so it’s all a bit of a mess while I try to finish things up.’ She’s off to Palazzo Monti, a 13th-century palace in northern Italy that hosts a residency programme founded by the collector Edoardo Monti. With Cristina BanBan, Flora Yukhnovich, Diane Dal-Pra and Ella Walker amongst the list of previous residents, she is in good company.

 

We settle down opposite each other on a pair of mismatched swivel chairs Harriet found on the street. ‘When I started here, I was in desperate need of somewhere to sit. I was talking to my friend about it and the next day, there they were at the end of the road,’ she explains with a laugh. ‘I keep thinking about what to manifest next…’

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Although the studio is quiet this morning in the hours before the other artists have arrived, music is a central source of inspiration for Harriet. ‘Musicians are the first people I met when I moved to London,’ she tells me, ‘and that’s kind of how I got into doing art properly.’ When studying English Literature at Edinburgh University, she made money painting, avoiding the tedious bar work that befell those of us lacking her artistic talents. She explains that  following graduation, ‘because I never knew what I wanted to paint, I would do these quick sketches at live gigs or of friends at pubs and found they were a really good framework to fill in.’ This way of working has stuck with her and continues to inform her approach to painting today.

 

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As a precarious pile of black, softbound sketchbooks to my left testifies, she carries basic drawing materials with her wherever she goes (‘I have too many sketchbooks. I keep forgetting one and then taking out another!’). She tucks herself away in the corners of music venues and pubs to sketch the scenes she observes unfolding around her. ‘I see the venues that I do my drawings in as the equivalent of my church, or what a church would be to someone who is religious, because they’re the sort of place that you can turn up to and see a familiar face.’ 

For Harriet, this idea of the ‘communal’ facilitates a familiarity distinct from friendship that allows her to sketch away undisturbed. ‘I’ll just sit in the corner, creepily drawing these people and they’re just like, “oh, that’s Harriet”. I’ve known them for years, but I know them there. That’s our place. So it has this nice feeling of being part of something without actually having to give too much of yourself.’

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Pulling out a sketchbook from the pile, she flicks it open to show me one of the scenes she has drawn in situ. Figures occupy the vaulted space of a music venue, crowded around an arch. The sketch has been translated onto a canvas propped against a wall. Painted in her dusky palette of pinks, purples and blues, the scene is shot through with the electric current of her signature neon orange spray paint. The figures are almost ghost-like in the atmospheric haze of the painting – as if being viewed through the rose-tinted spectacles of memory. ‘I like the timelessness of music,’ she tells me. ‘People have gathered together to watch music for centuries. I want my work to have that feeling that you can’t quite place it in time.’ 

 

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We walk over to another large painting, this time of Harriet’s sister and friends in a pub. With its palette and fluid handling of paint, the work is distinctly contemporary. Yet I’m struck by the resonances I find with the work of the modernist artists who populated the cafes of Paris, Oslo and Berlin. Think Picasso’s absinthe drinkers or Munch’s etchings of night cafes. I ask if art-historical imagery is important to her? ‘Yes,’ she nods enthusiastically, telling me of her love for Toulouse-Lautrec. ‘With a Toulouse-Lautrec, you often feel that you’re there,’ she says. ‘I think because he was there. And I feel the same way about my work. People always feel like they’re sat at the table.’ 

 

As she speaks, she gestures to the edge of a rounded table in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, cropped and positioned as if we have pulled up a chair of our own. ‘I think that’s why I need the spray paint,’ she continues, ‘because I need a material that is distinctively not of that era of Toulouse-Lautrec to keep it fresh.’

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•••​

 

I’m curious how she arrived at this unlikely medium. She shows me a collection of tiny, postcard-sized canvases arranged on the wall: her ‘icons’. Small enough to put in your pocket, the icon paintings are conceived by Harriet as a more personal side of her practice. ‘I wanted to make something you could treasure,’ she explains. Diminutive in scale, though evidently not ambition, they are her version of religious icon paintings. The luminous gold leaf typically found in these works is reimagined with the neon orange spray paint, which she applies to focussed areas of the canvas before articulating her figurative elements on top in oil. Playing with the feeling of light, her interior scenes are given an otherworldly glow.

 

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Repetition is a key element of Harriet’s practice, and she often paints the same image again and again across different formats. Drawing upon her memory of a scene, as much as the lines of her sketches, she plays with the idea of shifting focus in each iteration of an image. ‘That shift in scale helps with the shift in perspective,’ she explains. I imagine someone with a camera twisting the lens to bring different objects in and out of focus. Elsewhere, her diptychs speak to the process of her own artmaking. ‘They’re like the pages of my sketchbook blown up,’ she explains, ‘but there’s also this disruption. Even though I hang the two canvases close together, the line between them stops you from reading the image so linearly.’ Clearly even the formats of her works become a means through which she is able to play with perspective.

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In the studio, Harriet always has a playlist on the go (think Leonard Cohen, Kate Bush and Finnegan Tui). ‘There’s so many options of how you could paint something,’ she says to me, explaining that the mood of a song has the potential to characterise the atmosphere of a painting. 

 

Music and language also become key tools through which she introduces another layer of interpretation to her work. Song lyrics are often integrated into her titles or are even written directly around the edges of her canvases. ‘Quite often I’ll use a little snippet of text to anchor a painting and help me find the feeling I want within it,’ she explains. Although she prefers to use lyrics or poems written by her friends so she can ask them for permission, it’s not always possible. ‘I’ve emailed Kate Bush to ask,’ she says with a laugh, ‘but she hasn’t got back to me yet…’

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‘What time is it?’ Harriet suddenly exclaims, remembering her next appointment. It’s 11:10 am. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go!’ she exclaims, standing up. I get it. The hustle is real, and I know the feeling of trying to cram as much into each day as possible. In fact, I’m attempting to squeeze in an eye test and a visit to the National Portrait Gallery before lunch, making the most of my annual leave. ‘If you have any other questions, message me! I’ll send you a voice note,’ she calls over her shoulder as she cycles off. I stretch in the morning light before catching a glimpse of my watch. ‘Shit,’ I mutter under my breath as I run towards the opticians.

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Kitty Gurnos-Davies

25 March 2024

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Portrait of artist: Zoe Gillett. Studio images: Kitty Gurnos-Davies.