artists

Connie Harris

www.connieharris.com
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Constance Harris’ work is a reaction to the repetitive enactment of daily rituals that create patterns in our lives. Her paintings and wire sculptures are full of lines and loops, built up to create deep texture and layers. Harris describes her own work as “consistently evolving in form, like the alchemy of sculpture into print.” Her paintings are composed by recording both common and unusual words in bold cursive with rich, vibrant colors, and re-presenting them until their meanings and visual properties are obscured. Her wire sculptures are made out of thousands of feet of knitted wire to create large, delicate looking forms that are intricately woven to be quite sturdy.

Art critic and curator, Glen Helfand, describes Harris’ work: “Her paintings envisions vibrant conglomerations of words rendered in loopy, and vibrant colors. They relate to the spiritually inflected patterns of Mark Tobey, Brice Marden’s curvy gestures, and Alexandra Grant’s paintings in which words are seen in reverse, as much as they do to the unfettered, somewhat outlaw feel of graffiti and street art. Harris’s use of wire, nodding to Ruth Asawa’s hanging vessels, gives the cursive quality of handwriting solid form. When Harris knits steel wire, the resulting forms slump, yet are clearly durable. She calls them sprouts, as if they’ve organically emerged from the earth, if not her imagination. She’s also turned out a porous series of copper curtains, that when approached from certain angles, mesh into a minimalist grid.” Constance Harris graduated form the San Francisco Art Institute in 1986, with a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Sculpture. She has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and England.

Harris currently lives and works in San Francisco.

Reviews/Essays/Articles
Glen Helfand, Connie Harris: Actions and Words In•Form