Harriet White

My paintings explore the relationship between reality and memory, transforming tangled forest spaces into intimate, dreamlike landscapes that balance a meticulous, photographic precision with a looser, painterly approach. The scenes I am drawn to are often anonymous and overlooked, unanchored to a specific place or time. Within this organic chaos, I strive to establish a quiet compositional order, reshaping the pieces into believable, painterly spaces.

Via the mechanics of photography, I push the composition away from literal reality by zeroing in on close-up spaces where details fluidly dissolve and reappear. I isolate scenes from their context and use tight cropping to abstract them into fragments, mirroring the fractured and fragile way we often remember the past. This departure from reality is developed further through shifts in colour. By altering palettes, I hope to evoke a sense of nostalgia or a sudden fondness for a place never visited, akin to remembering a scene from a film or trying to recall a dream. I enjoy the tension within this contradiction: our experience as viewers can be both deeply personal and wholly universal. Few people will have visited the specific place depicted, but the atmosphere remains instantly recognisable—evoking the universal, damp warmth of a forest after rain.

- Harriet White