Art in Conversation
Harriet Gillett
Hot Sheet’s upcoming exhibition, If Paris Was a Woman, opens on 26th September at Gallery Maison Bertraux, featuring artist Harriet Gillett. In conversation with Lauren Wells from Hot Sheet, Harriet reflects on the emergence of motifs in her work, the influence of poetry and music, the role of café culture, and how painting serves as both storytelling and self-mythologising.
Your paintings blend elements of memory, observation, and magical realism. Can you share a bit about your creative process and how you balance these different layers when composing a piece?
I guess the magical realism element is that I draw from observation, directly from life. It helps me to break a space up, reducing it to lines and shapes, and flatten everything. It makes you think more consciously of how you view things. When you’re drawing, you're focused on a specific thing that draws you to the scene. It might be a person, but it might also be a mural on a wall, anything can become the focus. And often they can become quite surreal because, you know, things seem more alive than they might be in reality. I like the idea of things transforming and when you paint them they become about other things than what was initially observed. I suppose I'm interested in how, through that process, you can upset the usual hierarchy of how you view something and look at it with a new perspective.
When I make the painting from these sketches, they act like blueprints or skeletons that I then have to flesh out with color. I bring in whatever color feels right, it might be inspired by something I'm seeing at the time or the place that I was drawing or the person I'm drawing or maybe it's just the atmosphere of that night, some kind of memory but also what I’m feeling in the moment; or what I’m feeling about my experience of that specific night. There'll be a lot of things that dictate how I paint something and it’s shifting all the time, which is why I often like to repeat them. I don’t think about balancing as such, I think more about how all these elements blend together into the painting.
You know, when you look back at something, the way you remember it really dictates how you think about it. I'm really interested in this type of therapy called Gestalt therapy, where you look at memories and you try to reframe them in your mind. I see my paintings a bit like that. Often I'll make multiple paintings of the same drawing, and see how it shifts each time because every time you come to make a painting, so much has happened. Just like every time you visit and revisit a memory, you come with your newer experiences and everything always affects it. So I suppose the painting is a kind of a visual diary, and similarly to a diary you can never look back on something the same because you've changed in the meantime.
The more I notice things the more I see them everywhere and then they show up on my paintings. This year I keep noticing and drawing the nicotine stains on ceilings, they reminded me of clouds in some frescoes I was drawing last year. I’m seeing clouds everywhere. These little parts of an interior then become almost portals to something else. There’s this part of the wall in MB where you go up the stairs where all the paint has been scraped away, that made me think of clouds passing by, became the main inspiration for Passage. I like the ambiguity in abstraction as you can play around with reality, where things are going in the painting. I like the looseness of it. And when you paint from a drawing, reality’s gone, the hierarchy's gone, the color's gone, you’re left with just this kind of plot line, what you saw or wanted to see when you made the drawing. So then it really can evolve into anything you want it to be, I think that’s the magic of it. I like to say it's like you're finding the potential in things, where you can take the everyday.
Many of your titles come from songs or poetry or hint at stories without being explicit. How do you see the relationship between music, poetry, and visual art in your practice?
Music for me is one of the best art forms because it's so direct and touches the most people the quickest. I want to channel that rawness, often what I am listening to at the time of painting I’ll hear a lyric and think yeah that’s perfect for this painting, it communicates it perfectly so I will use that lyric as an anchor for the painting. I like to think of painting, almost like a song. It's layers of different languages that all translate or communicate various feelings. For example, when I listen to a Kate Bush song, you have all these different instruments and styles that nod to other times and genres. She mixes them all together but you're still getting all that peripheral stuff. I suppose in a way poems work the same, there's so much wider connotations that come from using certain symbols and certain words in specific ways. One specific image can oscillate out into so many inferred meanings.
I think I do take quite a poetic stance to painting because I feel that so much can be said through the way you paint. It's also so personal. Everyone can kind of tap into it in their own way but it's also my coded language and by using different references you can give hints, but you're never having to reveal too much. It's just up to the viewer and how they want to respond and certain people find certain references within them, and I like that. But they'll never find the whole, no one can ever really find the whole of everything.
Impressionist cafe culture is a key influence in your work. How do you see your paintings engaging in reinterpreting this tradition for a contemporary audience?
I really like the fact that in cafes, it's just a real mix of people.
I've always been drawn to this idea of going to a place through a shared interest rather than going to meet specific people. Having a community that only really comes from that experience. Being in these communal shared spaces, they each have such a character of their own. And they have their own cult following - real characters - that you get used to seeing around if you go there. The familiarity is nice. You can go to a place and you can feel part of something and you can become part of a community and I guess cafe culture for the impressionists was them just documenting that, and I am also doing that. I want more people to be open to that kind of more casual but still important connection. I feel I'm in between observing the world, people watching, and being interested in what's around you and being open to even the smallest interaction and that connection with someone.
The show's named after a documentary that's talking about the cafe culture scene in Paris and how Sylvia Beach created this bookshop where you could read a book before you bought it and all these amazing writers were coming out of there, and lots of interdisciplinary art. All people talking and making friends and sharing ideas. I just really love that. I think that's so necessary. It is so easy to get stuck in your own rut and a lot of people say that in London, it's so hard to meet people, but I just don't think that.
Soho is a key place for that in London because there are these institutions that have been there for so long and so many histories have been lived in those spaces. There are also so many myths around them and there's strands of identity and a mix of really random stuff and random people and everyone's there as individuals but it's still kind of a collective thing. In Soho, you feel the history in the walls and it's exciting. You never know who you're gonna bump into in Soho.
Your work evokes a timeless quality blurring the past and the present. How do you navigate the tension between nostalgia and immediacy in your art?
I don't want them to feel nostalgic as such. My work is about nostalgia, but then I think I'm more interested in how the pieces look to transform the past. The paintings have a warmth to them, but it's more about how they're creating a shift through the process of making it. The present is combined with the past which brings this transformation.
It links to the whole idea of magical realism, the memories, places, motifs are portals for something.
I think colour is really important for creating this idea of what I am feeling now about the memory or past moment. When I'm making the painting, I start with this initial drawing, this memory of a certain time where I was when I made it, but often the drawings are not very detailed. They're sketches. So when I make the painting, I'm having to make a lot of it up, like filling in the gaps in the memory which brings in elements of the present. The painting almost operates like my own process of recall, they are more about that than what the memory actually was. Often people have no clue what the painting actually is of when they look at it. Someone once thought my work was about some cowboys in the wild west! It’s more about the process of recall and observing that, than my personal nostalgic memory of a certain thing. That matters to me but I don’t mind if other people just find their own familiarities within it. I do like Morricone though.
That's also where the other references come in. I'm always trying to make something to feel meaningful to me, I make certain paintings at certain times because they feel right at the moment. Sometimes I'll be working from a drawing that I did years ago. It's very normal that I've had a bit of time between the drawing and the painting so I can look back on that time, but then also think about how much things have changed since then so it feels right to materialise that shift. So that becomes a dialogue in itself. There is an element of timelessness. I don't like painting things that can be placed to a moment in time. I like the ritualistic things of humanity, traditions that I personally think are important and should be kind of held on to, and that's why I'm painting them. I want this sense of community to continue. I’m sharing my love of that atmosphere, I’m trying to keep it in the present not subject it to the past. When you look at how many of these independent places are closing down, I wanna capture them and share the mentality that they have, before it's too late.
So maybe that is a bit nostalgic.
Many of your paintings feature recurring motifs, such as animals, objects, or other symbolic elements. What significance do these motifs hold for you, and how do you see their presence evolving across different works?
I like the idea of these recurring motifs that tend to come to me just through seeing them around repetitively. They pull the general narrative together and by repeating things, each time I repeat it, it sort of uncovers new meanings for me. The more something is focused on the more it kind of accumulates meaning. That's how myths are made. The accumulation of stories that are then told over time. Creating these motifs feels like a process of mythologisation, and the more I notice things, the more deeply I look into them, think about, and research the cultural and symbolic connotations of certain objects or things. Sources of light and lamps specifically. They’re sort of a symbol of hope. It’s this idea of wanting to turn off the light, turn on the light; start again with the new day. It's also a way for me to play with where I put a focus on painting as well, usually taking it away from the people in the scenes and putting it into other aspects of the world that are just as important… But new motifs are always coming in.
For this show, there were a lot of roses around when I started going to MB to draw. I think it had just been valentines day. Obviously, there's so many connotations that a rose has, so they kind of came into it well. Beauty and the beast, the metaphor of losing time in a dying flower, that amazing image that dorian grey begins with of a beautiful rose with its juxtaposing thorns, the two sides of it, double edged sword… all that sort of thing. I like tapping into the meaning that people associate with certain objects and animals.
I'm often drawn to animals but birds specifically. In mythology they are often referred to as messengers of the gods because they can traverse boundaries, earth and sky. I also like the idea that they're in tune with the seasons. Birdsong symbolises the morning, the beginning of each day. But then obviously there's so much symbolism in the different bird species. I draw a lot of swallows; because they're migratory birds they have a lot of symbolism around them in different cultures; they cross long distances but always return home. This time it’s been the pigeons in Soho. You can’t walk about without seeing them. They are a close relative to doves, which makes me feel they are loosely related to peace. You know those lines by leonard cohen,
‘the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free’
It feels apt. Pigeons are a symbol of the people. They were domesticated birds that were cast out when humans lost their need for their incredible natural homing device to send messages. So they always stay close. I find them so touching. We should be nicer to pigeons.
Chairs have a whole level of symbolism within them. An empty chair suggests absence, but also the potential presence. Are you alone? Are you waiting to meet someone? One of the most evocative paintings I have ever seen is by Celia Paul, of an empty chair. I was just hit by this feeling of grief. It was ethereal. I just love how there's a whole story within one object. And of course there’s van gogh’s chair painting, another favourite. I think it translates to the idea of not just being expressive, but the idea of art referencing things in art, in the history of art as well.
Could you talk a bit about how you conceptualise work and your interest in metafiction?
Meta fiction is a fiction that is self referential and refers to the fact that it is aware it is fictional. The writer will suddenly break the fourth wall a bit, be like hey I know this is a story and you’re reading it, I’m aware that I am writing something and that I can dictate how you will read it in a certain way. Being meta is making it something aware of the fact that it is constructed. It feels nice and post modern. And I'm particularly careful to never want to suggest that something is one certain way or one truth because just by the nature of how your brain works, you're always changing what the truth is and you can never really give another perspective other than your own. You can only ever tell a story from a subjective perspective, which likely changes with each telling, each construction, so why not draw attention to that? So whilst I'm referring to all these myths that have been made and stories that have been told, I also want it to be obvious that I'm building these worlds.
I'm always referencing these myths around a place, and I'm interested in how these become part of my own memories and self-mythologising process, and then in the paintings become part of this wider thing that other people can take their own stories from.
A myth or a fable is normally just grounded in some sort of lesson or something that is crucial, based on some ancient ritual, some basic life hack. You know? You get these stories that are told that then pass on, but they warp and distort through Chinese whispers that eventually turn into these crazy myths. I imagine that’s how most well known stories come into fruition. Every place that has any kind of longevity, acquires this kind of cultural mythology. There's myths around this bakery. Someone said to me: “Oh I heard they brought the croissant to the UK!” But then someone else immediately told me that it was actually a patisserie in Bath. I guess we’ll never know.
What I'm doing a bit differently in this show, which was encouraged for me to do by the unusual space, was rather than creating worlds to then put into the white wall gallery, I'm bringing the paintings into the space that many of the works were inspired by, almost bringing it back to the source. So people will see a chair that is literally the chair that is in the painting, and I like that sort of circularity, making it round and round, which meta fiction does. It's playful. Often my work can be quite serious. But I think by bringing it back into the space where it began, being exhibited in the space where I first made a quick sketch, might change the way that people understand the work or see the work. Also the context of it being seen in this setting makes it a bit more free, people are in a different mentality in a café than if they would be going into the gallery space.
“When you're drawing, you're focused on a specific thing that draws you to the scene. It might be a person, but it might also be a mural on a wall, anything can become the focus. I suppose I'm interested in how, through that process, you can upset the usual hierarchy of how you view something and look at it with a new perspective.”
- Harriet Gillett
“Paintings are a kind of a visual diary and similarly to a diary you can never look back on something the same because you've changed in the meantime.”
- Harriet Gillett
If Paris Was a Woman opens on the 25th September at Gallery Maison Bertaux and has
been curated by Hot Sheet and hosted by Hooligan Art Dealer.
Art in Conversation
Harriet Gillett
Hot Sheet’s upcoming exhibition, If Paris Was a Woman, opens on 26th September at Gallery Maison Bertraux, featuring artist Harriet Gillett. In conversation with Lauren Wells from Hot Sheet, Harriet reflects on the emergence of motifs in her work, the influence of poetry and music, the role of café culture, and how painting serves as both storytelling and self-mythologising.
“When you're drawing, you're focused on a specific thing that draws you to the scene. It might be a person, but it might also be a mural on a wall, anything can become the focus. I suppose I'm interested in how, through that process, you can upset the usual hierarchy of how you view something and look at it with a new perspective.”
- Harriet Gillett
Your paintings blend elements of memory, observation, and magical realism. Can you share a bit about your creative process and how you balance these different layers when composing a piece?
I guess the magical realism element is that I draw from observation, directly from life. It helps me to break a space up, reducing it to lines and shapes, and flatten everything. It makes you think more consciously of how you view things. When you’re drawing, you're focused on a specific thing that draws you to the scene. It might be a person, but it might also be a mural on a wall, anything can become the focus. And often they can become quite surreal because, you know, things seem more alive than they might be in reality. I like the idea of things transforming and when you paint them they become about other things than what was initially observed. I suppose I'm interested in how, through that process, you can upset the usual hierarchy of how you view something and look at it with a new perspective.
When I make the painting from these sketches, they act like blueprints or skeletons that I then have to flesh out with color. I bring in whatever color feels right, it might be inspired by something I'm seeing at the time or the place that I was drawing or the person I'm drawing or maybe it's just the atmosphere of that night, some kind of memory but also what I’m feeling in the moment; or what I’m feeling about my experience of that specific night. There'll be a lot of things that dictate how I paint something and it’s shifting all the time, which is why I often like to repeat them. I don’t think about balancing as such, I think more about how all these elements blend together into the painting.
You know, when you look back at something, the way you remember it really dictates how you think about it. I'm really interested in this type of therapy called Gestalt therapy, where you look at memories and you try to reframe them in your mind. I see my paintings a bit like that. Often I'll make multiple paintings of the same drawing, and see how it shifts each time because every time you come to make a painting, so much has happened. Just like every time you visit and revisit a memory, you come with your newer experiences and everything always affects it. So I suppose the painting is a kind of a visual diary, and similarly to a diary you can never look back on something the same because you've changed in the meantime.
The more I notice things the more I see them everywhere and then they show up on my paintings. This year I keep noticing and drawing the nicotine stains on ceilings, they reminded me of clouds in some frescoes I was drawing last year. I’m seeing clouds everywhere. These little parts of an interior then become almost portals to something else. There’s this part of the wall in MB where you go up the stairs where all the paint has been scraped away, that made me think of clouds passing by, became the main inspiration for Passage. I like the ambiguity in abstraction as you can play around with reality, where things are going in the painting. I like the looseness of it. And when you paint from a drawing, reality’s gone, the hierarchy's gone, the color's gone, you’re left with just this kind of plot line, what you saw or wanted to see when you made the drawing. So then it really can evolve into anything you want it to be, I think that’s the magic of it. I like to say it's like you're finding the potential in things, where you can take the everyday.
Many of your titles come from songs or poetry or hint at stories without being explicit. How do you see the relationship between music, poetry, and visual art in your practice?
Music for me is one of the best art forms because it's so direct and touches the most people the quickest. I want to channel that rawness, often what I am listening to at the time of painting I’ll hear a lyric and think yeah that’s perfect for this painting, it communicates it perfectly so I will use that lyric as an anchor for the painting. I like to think of painting, almost like a song. It's layers of different languages that all translate or communicate various feelings. For example, when I listen to a Kate Bush song, you have all these different instruments and styles that nod to other times and genres. She mixes them all together but you're still getting all that peripheral stuff. I suppose in a way poems work the same, there's so much wider connotations that come from using certain symbols and certain words in specific ways. One specific image can oscillate out into so many inferred meanings.
I think I do take quite a poetic stance to painting because I feel that so much can be said through the way you paint. It's also so personal. Everyone can kind of tap into it in their own way but it's also my coded language and by using different references you can give hints, but you're never having to reveal too much. It's just up to the viewer and how they want to respond and certain people find certain references within them, and I like that. But they'll never find the whole, no one can ever really find the whole of everything.
Impressionist cafe culture is a key influence in your work. How do you see your paintings engaging in reinterpreting this tradition for a contemporary audience?
I really like the fact that in cafes, it's just a real mix of people.
I've always been drawn to this idea of going to a place through a shared interest rather than going to meet specific people. Having a community that only really comes from that experience. Being in these communal shared spaces, they each have such a character of their own. And they have their own cult following - real characters - that you get used to seeing around if you go there. The familiarity is nice. You can go to a place and you can feel part of something and you can become part of a community and I guess cafe culture for the impressionists was them just documenting that, and I am also doing that. I want more people to be open to that kind of more casual but still important connection. I feel I'm in between observing the world, people watching, and being interested in what's around you and being open to even the smallest interaction and that connection with someone.
The show's named after a documentary that's talking about the cafe culture scene in Paris and how Sylvia Beach created this bookshop where you could read a book before you bought it and all these amazing writers were coming out of there, and lots of interdisciplinary art. All people talking and making friends and sharing ideas. I just really love that. I think that's so necessary. It is so easy to get stuck in your own rut and a lot of people say that in London, it's so hard to meet people, but I just don't think that.
Soho is a key place for that in London because there are these institutions that have been there for so long and so many histories have been lived in those spaces. There are also so many myths around them and there's strands of identity and a mix of really random stuff and random people and everyone's there as individuals but it's still kind of a collective thing. In Soho, you feel the history in the walls and it's exciting. You never know who you're gonna bump into in Soho.
Your work evokes a timeless quality blurring the past and the present. How do you navigate the tension between nostalgia and immediacy in your art?
I don't want them to feel nostalgic as such. My work is about nostalgia, but then I think I'm more interested in how the pieces look to transform the past. The paintings have a warmth to them, but it's more about how they're creating a shift through the process of making it. The present is combined with the past which brings this transformation.
It links to the whole idea of magical realism, the memories, places, motifs are portals for something.
I think colour is really important for creating this idea of what I am feeling now about the memory or past moment. When I'm making the painting, I start with this initial drawing, this memory of a certain time where I was when I made it, but often the drawings are not very detailed. They're sketches. So when I make the painting, I'm having to make a lot of it up, like filling in the gaps in the memory which brings in elements of the present. The painting almost operates like my own process of recall, they are more about that than what the memory actually was. Often people have no clue what the painting actually is of when they look at it. Someone once thought my work was about some cowboys in the wild west! It’s more about the process of recall and observing that, than my personal nostalgic memory of a certain thing. That matters to me but I don’t mind if other people just find their own familiarities within it. I do like Morricone though.
That's also where the other references come in. I'm always trying to make something to feel meaningful to me, I make certain paintings at certain times because they feel right at the moment. Sometimes I'll be working from a drawing that I did years ago. It's very normal that I've had a bit of time between the drawing and the painting so I can look back on that time, but then also think about how much things have changed since then so it feels right to materialise that shift. So that becomes a dialogue in itself. There is an element of timelessness. I don't like painting things that can be placed to a moment in time. I like the ritualistic things of humanity, traditions that I personally think are important and should be kind of held on to, and that's why I'm painting them. I want this sense of community to continue. I’m sharing my love of that atmosphere, I’m trying to keep it in the present not subject it to the past. When you look at how many of these independent places are closing down, I wanna capture them and share the mentality that they have, before it's too late.
So maybe that is a bit nostalgic.
“Paintings are a kind of a visual diary and similarly to a diary you can never look back on something the same because you've changed in the meantime.”
- Harriet Gillett
Many of your paintings feature recurring motifs, such as animals, objects, or other symbolic elements. What significance do these motifs hold for you, and how do you see their presence evolving across different works?
I like the idea of these recurring motifs that tend to come to me just through seeing them around repetitively. They pull the general narrative together and by repeating things, each time I repeat it, it sort of uncovers new meanings for me. The more something is focused on the more it kind of accumulates meaning. That's how myths are made. The accumulation of stories that are then told over time. Creating these motifs feels like a process of mythologisation, and the more I notice things, the more deeply I look into them, think about, and research the cultural and symbolic connotations of certain objects or things. Sources of light and lamps specifically. They’re sort of a symbol of hope. It’s this idea of wanting to turn off the light, turn on the light; start again with the new day. It's also a way for me to play with where I put a focus on painting as well, usually taking it away from the people in the scenes and putting it into other aspects of the world that are just as important… But new motifs are always coming in.
For this show, there were a lot of roses around when I started going to MB to draw. I think it had just been valentines day. Obviously, there's so many connotations that a rose has, so they kind of came into it well. Beauty and the beast, the metaphor of losing time in a dying flower, that amazing image that dorian grey begins with of a beautiful rose with its juxtaposing thorns, the two sides of it, double edged sword… all that sort of thing. I like tapping into the meaning that people associate with certain objects and animals.
I'm often drawn to animals but birds specifically. In mythology they are often referred to as messengers of the gods because they can traverse boundaries, earth and sky. I also like the idea that they're in tune with the seasons. Birdsong symbolises the morning, the beginning of each day. But then obviously there's so much symbolism in the different bird species. I draw a lot of swallows; because they're migratory birds they have a lot of symbolism around them in different cultures; they cross long distances but always return home. This time it’s been the pigeons in Soho. You can’t walk about without seeing them. They are a close relative to doves, which makes me feel they are loosely related to peace. You know those lines by leonard cohen,
‘the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free’
It feels apt. Pigeons are a symbol of the people. They were domesticated birds that were cast out when humans lost their need for their incredible natural homing device to send messages. So they always stay close. I find them so touching. We should be nicer to pigeons.
Chairs have a whole level of symbolism within them. An empty chair suggests absence, but also the potential presence. Are you alone? Are you waiting to meet someone? One of the most evocative paintings I have ever seen is by Celia Paul, of an empty chair. I was just hit by this feeling of grief. It was ethereal. I just love how there's a whole story within one object. And of course there’s van gogh’s chair painting, another favourite. I think it translates to the idea of not just being expressive, but the idea of art referencing things in art, in the history of art as well.
Could you talk a bit about how you conceptualise work and your interest in metafiction?
Meta fiction is a fiction that is self referential and refers to the fact that it is aware it is fictional. The writer will suddenly break the fourth wall a bit, be like hey I know this is a story and you’re reading it, I’m aware that I am writing something and that I can dictate how you will read it in a certain way. Being meta is making it something aware of the fact that it is constructed. It feels nice and post modern. And I'm particularly careful to never want to suggest that something is one certain way or one truth because just by the nature of how your brain works, you're always changing what the truth is and you can never really give another perspective other than your own. You can only ever tell a story from a subjective perspective, which likely changes with each telling, each construction, so why not draw attention to that? So whilst I'm referring to all these myths that have been made and stories that have been told, I also want it to be obvious that I'm building these worlds.
I'm always referencing these myths around a place, and I'm interested in how these become part of my own memories and self-mythologising process, and then in the paintings become part of this wider thing that other people can take their own stories from.
A myth or a fable is normally just grounded in some sort of lesson or something that is crucial, based on some ancient ritual, some basic life hack. You know? You get these stories that are told that then pass on, but they warp and distort through Chinese whispers that eventually turn into these crazy myths. I imagine that’s how most well known stories come into fruition. Every place that has any kind of longevity, acquires this kind of cultural mythology. There's myths around this bakery. Someone said to me: “Oh I heard they brought the croissant to the UK!” But then someone else immediately told me that it was actually a patisserie in Bath. I guess we’ll never know.
What I'm doing a bit differently in this show, which was encouraged for me to do by the unusual space, was rather than creating worlds to then put into the white wall gallery, I'm bringing the paintings into the space that many of the works were inspired by, almost bringing it back to the source. So people will see a chair that is literally the chair that is in the painting, and I like that sort of circularity, making it round and round, which meta fiction does. It's playful. Often my work can be quite serious. But I think by bringing it back into the space where it began, being exhibited in the space where I first made a quick sketch, might change the way that people understand the work or see the work. Also the context of it being seen in this setting makes it a bit more free, people are in a different mentality in a café than if they would be going into the gallery space.
If Paris Was a Woman opens on the 25th September at Gallery Maison Bertaux and has
been curated by Hot Sheet and hosted by Hooligan Art Dealer.