Harriet Owles

In 2019, Harriet Owles, then a film student at Falmouth University, wrote and directed a thesis film called The Artisan. The ten-minute long thread of sequences followed the story of a 13-year old homesick girl during World War II, in search of self-expression through painting. Moody shots of the protagonist painting in her bedroom were stirred with her attempts at sketching stark figures. The art depicted in the film was made by none other than Owles herself. “The fact that I had spent more time on the visuals than the actual plot was a sign that I was in the wrong department,” she says. 

The epiphany prompted the British artist to shift gears in her journey: she eventually left the camera behind to reach for the easel. Just a few years after her transition to art, Owles recently graduated from the painting department at the Royal College of Art, where she has honed an arresting form of figuration with cinematic angles. Invested in emotionality and mystery, the artist conveys a visual language that intrigues the viewer with circular compositions yet leaves the narratives open-ended with energetic potentials. 

Line My Speed Up Join (2024), which she unveiled in her thesis show at RCA in June, shows a quartet of people occupying four corners of the canvas. The figures stretch their bodies with arms open, while gazing at each other. Their effortless drift renders the posers, who are indeed Owles’s classmates in motion, as if they were gliding weightlessly in the air like flocks of birds or floating on the surface of a placid lake. The bodies possess a state of levitation and ecstasy; they don detachment and allusiveness like prized jewelry. An alchemy of being grounded and hovering inhabits her subjects in contemporary attires and aloof demeanors.

The penetrating impression in Owles’s painting stems from the pouncing technique which was commonly used in traditional frescoes. The artist starts with a drawing on a paper which she later transfers onto linen by picking the outline of her sketch with a needle. “This way, I have my sketch without marking my raw canvas around my figures—they are hidden when I start painting,” she explains. Her visits to Rome and Venice where she encountered “numerous of frescoes in which the perspective of angels looking down from heaven gave the figures agency,” inspired the artist to build “heaps of engagement” with tradition. 

Owles settled on her compositions by contemplating form and meaning, a period which was informed by encountering Francis Bacon paintings at Tate Britain. The particular cue she unearthed in a Bacon was “how to create a curve or a rectangle to isolate a figure.” The potential to illustrate psychological depth through a poser’s physical likeness, as Bacon proved, was ample. “I started asking what four figures in a painting could subconsciously mean, maybe the seasons or the time of passing…” 

The obsession with seriality in close proximity is far from surprising for a former film student. In her graduation work, the figures’ hands and fingers point to the next direction, towards a sense of flow that imbues the painting with a kinetic force. Owles’s chase for an “obvious movement around painting” is evident in As We Change Places (2023), in which her sister is echoed four times on each end of the canvas. In a tranquil mobility, she loops around the surface in similar postures that are decidedly calm. A different outfit in each version hints at a broken procession with no return, particularly nodding at changing seasons and the irreversibility of time. The film roll is a stark reference, too. As an avid collector of images, she explores the connectivity between natural transitions as well as seemingly unrelated feelings and occurrences. From Eadweard Muybridge’s early experiments with moving imagery to the nature’s own rhythmic rejuvenation throughout the seasons, what ensues intrigues Owles. “Multiple figures can create a story in a way where each person is a scene,” she adds.

<Read the full essay from Issue Eight>