Inside Laura Harris’s
Return to Raw Abstraction
A horizon line blurs beneath layers of ripped canvas, linen, and paper. Acrylic sits scraped back in one corner and built up thick in another, while a pencil mark, half legible, surfaces through the surface like a memory that refuses to stay buried. This is the terrain of an artist working through mixed media with the patience of a geologist and the restlessness of someone chasing something just out of reach.
Ragged, True & Beautiful
48 x 60”
Laura Harris, whose new body of work is currently on view through Gallery Merrick, describes the collection as something of a homecoming. After a period spent immersed in bright, colourful florals, she found herself drawn back to the raw, elemental landscapes that first defined her practice. “These pieces are gritty, loose, layered and a little wild,” Harris writes of the new work, noting that horizon lines blur and edges are “pushed, softened, worn back and built up again,” in pursuit of a timeworn patina that has long occupied her attention.
Words surface within the paintings themselves, worked quietly into the surface rather than announced. Phrases including “kick off the weight of things” and “we used to run free & wild” appear beneath the texture, legible only to those willing to look closely, and rewarding that attention with a sense of discovery rather than declaration.
Joe Bembridge, curator and owner of Gallery Merrick, has followed Harris’s practice since long before she joined the gallery’s roster. “My first reaction was that they were absolutely arresting,” he says of encountering her work while working as a sales associate at Canada House Gallery in Banff. That early impression, he explains, has only deepened over time. “The more you look, the more you see the incredible control within the activation of her layers of texture, her palette and her unique brush work,” he says, adding that Harris manages a rare combination: consistency across a body of work paired with genuine surprise in every individual piece.
Same Place, Same Time
36 x 36”
Commissions, in particular, reveal something distinct about her process. Bembridge calls the work he does with clients commissioning pieces from Harris among his favourite undertakings as a gallerist, noting that no one in the industry approaches the process quite the way she does. “I don’t take the trust she places in me as her home gallerist lightly, and I constantly strive to be the best for her and our clients,” he says.
Please Don’t Smooth All Of Your Edges (they’re the best part)
36 x 30”
That trust extends to a collector base that spans private buyers and corporate clients, including Mercedes Benz and The Ritz Carlton. Bembridge describes the audience drawn to Harris’s paintings as sophisticated, whether collectors arrive with an established eye or develop one through prolonged engagement with her work. “Her work transforms spaces,” he says, pointing to the way collecting her paintings often becomes part of a longer process of evolving the environments they inhabit.
In That Moment
36 x 30”
What distinguishes Harris within a roster that includes artists such as Grant Leier and Rande Cook is the specific tension her work holds, a grit paired with tranquility, built through years of layering, scraping, and rebuilding. Her paintings do not resolve into tidy landscapes so much as gesture toward them, leaving enough unfinished for the viewer to complete the thought.
The current collection remains on view, with new commissions ongoing for collectors unable to see the work in person. For an artist who describes her own practice as a push and pull between control and letting go, the paintings ask something similar of anyone standing in front of them: slow down, look past the surface, and notice what has been built, scraped back, and built again.