Alexa Harris is a contemporary artst whose practice moves between painting, drawing and object-based work, rooted in rawness and deconstruction. Her compositions often retain an unfinished edge, an unfilled space within a landscape or a headless figure – preserving immediacy and immersion. For Harris, resolution is secondary to truth. She is renowned for her powerful depiction of women and their strength. These executed works are collected worldwide and exhibited widely here in the UK. Harris has recently been appointed as co-curator, exhibiting amongst well known and emerging artists, in private residential projects in the UK.
Colour, form, and light drive her process. Influenced by Michelangelo’s unfinished drawings, Titian’s command of colour, Rembrandt’s gestural fluency and the spiritual intensity of Viola’s video works, she builds layered compositions that carry both art historical reference and personal inquiry.
Harris is inspired by creatives such as Artemisia Gentileschi, and visionaries Lee Miller and Jane Campion who have all had a huge impact in Harris’ practice as empowering figures for women in art. She explores women as life givers, healers and warriors.
A significant body of her recent work centres on the death of her father. The found objects that populate her studio – his smoking pipe, black hat, old casino dice and fragments from his workspace are not casual discoveries but deeply personal artefacts. They hold memory, scent, and presence. Through painting, transformation and recontextualisation, Harris revisits and reworks these objects as a way of processing loss. The act of making becomes both confrontation and preservation.
There is a continual push and pull within her work. She strips back when necessary, seeking freshness and clarity, aiming to reveal strength and fragility simultaneously. At its core, her practice is a visual conversation about me, memory, and the three-dimensionality of line within space – how division and connection coexist, how something can be broken yet still hold.
A significant body of your recent work centres on the death of your father. At what point did you feel ready to begin translating that experience into visual form?
It began almost immediately. My father had returned to painting in the last twenty years of his life; around the same time I was studying for my Fine Art degree. When he died, he left behind an unfinished diptych, and I felt a strong impulse to respond to it. Rather than complete the painting in a literal sense, I began recontextualising the work as part of my own practice. One of the pieces depicted a wheat field, which inevitably called to mind the wheat fields of Vincent van Gogh, but also our shared attachment to the Yorkshire landscape.
That image became a point of departure. What began as a response to a single unfinished work gradually developed into a wider exploration of loss, memory and artistic inheritance.
Over the following seven years it expanded into a substantial body of work, including abstracted landscapes, video installations and pieces incorporating found objects. In some works I even used scent, recognising that memory is often carried as much through the senses as through images. The project became less about finishing something he had left behind, and more about finding a visual language through which to process absence and continuity.
You incorporate objects from your father’s studio, such as his pipe, hat and personal artefacts. How does working with these items alter your relationship to memory?
The materiality of these found objects carries traces of past experience, yet working with them in the present allows for a shift: I reinvent and repurpose them during the act of making, giving them new life, purpose, and meaning.
A clear example is his matchbox collection. Handling, seeing, smelling, or reworking these matchboxes doesn’t simply trigger a memory. It embodies gestures, habits, and specific moments in time. Through this process, distant memories are reignited and transformed, becoming something tangible and simultaneously something entirely new.
Is the act of transforming these objects into artworks a form of preservation, release, or something more complex?
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They become whole, the artworks tell a new story, so to speak, through which there’s a visual language to decode while making the work. It’s a form of reconnection, perhaps not letting go, but reevaluating and progressing. A way of marking down and telling a personal story, which can mirror the viewers’ / audiences’ experiences, through my practice both in an art historical and personal context.
Grief can be both overwhelming and quiet. How does that duality manifest within your materials and compositions?
Grief holds a duality, oscillating between the quiet and what I call inner strength now. In my work, this is reflected through contrasts in materials and space, between dense layered areas and calm, open pauses. Found objects and materials carry their own weight and their own histories. They become a way for memory to remain physically present in the work. I blend heavy, gestural layers with lighter, peaceful spaces, and I often draw from the past, whether it’s old tools, films or photographs. This interplay of past, present and future along with the human element, always brings something new into the work.
Your work often retains an unfinished edge. Does leaving space unresolved echo the incomplete nature of loss?
Yes, leaving space unresolved echoes the incomplete nature of loss. I want to allow the viewer in, bringing their experience and narrative to find their way. Over working a piece into ‘high definition’ can be a problem and over explained. The unfinished element reminds me of things being incomplete or unexplained which becomes more authentic. More of a snapshot or a moment in time which is captured and more unsettling and holds my attention. As Joan Didion writes about grief in ’The Year of Magical Thinking’, that it is not a closed event but an ongoing landscape you inhabit, discovering it only gradually and this resonates with me. Also, Emily Dickinson writes (Poem 1189 and Poem 657) ‘Unable are the Loved to die For Love is Immortality’ and refers to ‘the dead remaining present through love, so loss is never fully complete’.
You speak about stripping work back when it goes too far. In emotionally charged pieces, how do you know when to stop?
You don’t. That’s the challenge. It’s a bit like watching magic. There’s always a risk of it failing, but with a trained eye and constant practice it usually does and you don’t know why. Like the filmmaker Paul Garner stated, ‘A painting is never finished; it just simply stops in interesting places.’
I may have the perfect and completed head on a figurative piece, and it somehow looks ‘too much’. I’ll literally wipe the whole section off the canvas with my arm. It’s gone, but I know where it’s been. I’ll sit with it for a while and reconsider then usually stop.
Line and spatial tension are central to your thinking. How does line function when exploring themes of separation and connection?
In my practice, line functions as a site of tension, at once dividing and binding the elements it describes. Across my abstracted figurative painting, photographic and installation works line traverses the surface like a seam, threshold, or suture, delineating bodies and space while also suggesting connection. It creates intervals that are rarely neutral. Instead, they become charged zones where proximity, absence and memory quietly accumulate. Line guides the viewer’s eye across the composition, tracing relationships that persist even where separation is implied. It’s not simply a description device but a structural and psychological one, articulating the delicate oscillation between attachment and distance that underpins my work.
Your influences range from Michelangelo to Bill Viola. Have any of these artists shaped how you approach themes of mortality and transcendence?
From Michelangelo to Viola and importantly from Jane Campion to Lee Miller these artists have shaped how I explore mortality and transcendence. Michelangelo taught me the body can carry the weight of time; Viola showed how stillness and repetition can evoke the eternal. Campion guides me through subtle emotional and psychological landscapes, while Miller reveals the extraordinary in the everyday. Across my abstracted figurative paintings and photographic work, I’m drawn to the delicate tension between the finite and the infinite, creating spaces where presence, memory, and fleeting moments converge.
When audiences encounter these deeply personal works, do you hope they see your story specifically, or find space for their own?
I hope they feel both. The works are deeply personal, yet the spaces they create are open for others to inhabit. Seeing responses to ‘Does that mean you’re not coming to dinner?’, was humbling. One audience member, who hadn’t personally experienced loss, was moved to tears. I wasn’t sure whether to apologise or thank her at the time. It made me realise that emotional responses are part of the work, but engagement can be entirely personal. We all feel and see differently, so our reactions can be imagined or felt as grief, or simply the passing of time.
So I see it as a space where presence and absence meet, and where memory, grief, and connection can quietly coexist.
Looking ahead, do you feel this body of work is evolving into something new, or is it an ongoing dialogue with memory?
Yes, the current work in progress is evolving while remaining a dialogue with memory. I’m focusing on women and women in war, exploring the strength within us all, resilience and hope in the darkest of times. I make and create to make sense of our complex world. Title, ‘Release series 1’, is a photographic series based on documenting and installing found domestic objects and how they can be perceived in conflict.
‘Release’, transforms everyday cable ties into a stark symbol of women’s bondage in wartime. The white plastic against red-painted nails creates a tension between industrial control and human vulnerability. Cascading ties form a haunting portrait of systematic violence, while the Believe bracelet adds an ironic, unsettling commentary. It’s a visual metaphor that asks viewers to confront how ordinary objects can be turned into instruments of brutality, showing how conflict commodifies women’s bodies and presence.
You can currently view Alexa‘s work at Zebra One Gallery in Hamsptead, London zebraonegallery
For more information visit Alexa website and Instagram
