Corridor8: An Interview with Tommy Harrison
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| Display IV (2025) by Tommy Harrison |
One artist in this very position is realist painter, Tommy Harrison. Stockport-born, now Ardwick-based, I find Harrison hidden away on the still-active Maple industrial estate, a short walk from Manchester Royal Infirmary. Scaffolders and glass-makers play footy in the car park as I snake around the site. Harrison’s studio sits in the furthest corner, and on the sunny Wednesday I meet him, his usually-shuttered entrance is wide open.
Supported by his resident gallery, GRIMM, and currently on display in London, Harrison’s latest exhibition Displays takes inspiration from this industrial location. Each painting serves up a plane-view peek beyond a, shuttered door. What’s on display beyond each ominous gate is what makes Harrison’s work really intriguing. From marble statues to crashed cars, each object has been painstakingly positioned within this industrial frame. Describing these jarring openings, Harrison sees them as an attempt to create tension. A balance of light and dark, open and closed, metal and fabric. Just one note away from harmony, he tells me, like that discordant, jazzy note that doesn’t quite fit.
Markedly distinct from his previous works, the paintings shown in Displays draw clear inspiration from his industrial surroundings and serve as an extensive exploration into a single theme. I chatted to Harrison in his chamomile-tea-littered studio to find out more.
PM: Throughout Displays there’s a clear influence from your surroundings here, the industrial surroundings. Has spending time in this studio affected how you work and how you view your practice. How does it contrast with where you’ve worked before?
TH: Yes, very much so. I come in every single day, and on the surface it’s gross, but with time it becomes really interesting with the peeling bits of paint and whatnot. It’s so intricately detailed. So yeah, with time it started to fascinate me.
[Previously] I had a studio in a bedroom and then art school, which are obviously quite sanitary environments. My studio at OA in Salford had a similar energy, actually. It was pretty industrial but much more surrounded, like a weird little island: one building within an ocean of high rise flats. It was really strange. Whereas this, obviously, is much more sprawl-like and cut off, you know, industrial as hell.
PM: Do you think your surroundings affected what you were painting in your old studios as much as they do now?
TH: No. I don’t think they influenced me at all before. I actually had my old studio whilst I was still a student, so I’d have my head in a textbook all the time. Whereas now I just, kind of, look around a bit more. I’ve learned how to use what I’ve studied and apply it to my surroundings. Using it directly, if that makes sense.
PM: In a lot of your work, there’s this idea of contrast; of light and dark, fabric and metal, formality and decay. Where do you think this interest comes from and is there something specific you’re trying to express through that contrast?
TH: Yes. I’d say the specific thing would be the feeling of tension. You can feel it in music or or see it in paintings. When you’re listening to a song there can be a bit which grabs you every time, I wanna achieve that feeling, but through something visual. And I guess it’s developed through time from looking at works which I think achieve that feeling and studying how it’s been done, whether it’s through surface, or geometry, or shape or the intertwining of the thousands of elements you could think about. So I’m constantly exploring that through all the various changes within my own work. It’s, kind of, all to achieve one feeling. I want it to hit hard, and then reveal more, I guess. Not just to smack you with that then fade off. You want that initial bite and then the sustenance behind it to keep it going.
PM: These latest paintings are being exhibited in a space quite different from where they were created. Do you think, between viewer and yourself, the experience of the work differs based on the surroundings? Do you think that matters?
TH: I don’t know if it matters, but I think it would be different. Like, you can see in here, the lighting’s kind of crap, there’s shadows everywhere, and they look all right now, the lights, but they get really orangey-yellow at night. So I think they probably look better outside of the studio. But I also think that because I’ve made them, and I’ve spent so long looking at them, I think I’m more aware of them and what they contain, than a viewer would be. Then also my perception of what they are could be completely warped by being the maker. I know all the nasty things I’ve scrubbed off and, to me, they can sometimes feel tarnished and horrible. But then you see them somewhere else and they’ve got a freshness which I’m relieved by. Or maybe I don’t even see it and someone else tells me it’s there.
PM: The way you’ve talked about your practice in interviews before often emphasizes the material; the linen, the construction of the frame, working with the surface itself. What role would you say that physical element plays in your work?
TH: It’s entirely intertwined, a very large part of it. The meaning of it is within the making itself as well as what I depict. It’s the way you apply it, because you know, you can mix paint to a thousand different thicknesses and add wax to it, and that’s all in pursuit of creating variety in surface and temperament and touch. Personally, in what I do, and a lot of the artists I admire, there’s always a huge array of ways in which the paint is applied, and I like my eye being thrown around by that.
Note: prior to his career in painting, Harrison studied and practised Landscape Architecture, in Sheffield and Amsterdam respectively.
PM: Do you think studying architecture has affected how you see your practice, the philosophy of it? Because architecture’s quite brief-focused and functional as opposed to what you’re doing now. Do you think that still influences your work?
TH: You know what, now you’ve mentioned it, I would love a brief. That would be so nice [laughs]. Yeah, I absolutely miss the brief. It was so good to go off. But yeah, I guess I create my own brief in my head and I always make moodboards for the paintings on my computer, which I guess comes from the architecture world, like you just scan the internet, scan books, and draw shit from your own mind and just proper splurge everything out. Then you slowly weasel in on what it is you want. And once I’ve honed in a bit, that’s when I begin the work. Then I kind of end up abandoning it on the way, or not abandoning it or, you know, adding or not adding. There’s no kind of fixed process, but it’s often a result of a large concoction of things coming together, visually and ideas, all mashing and then slowly narrowing down, which I guess is what you do [in architecture] once you’ve had your brief.
PM: Where we are now, your disused industrial unit type space, mills and old factories, they’re a common venue for contemporary art, particularly in Manchester. Factory Records, Islington Mill and the White Hotel are obvious examples. Do you see your work within a wider context of industrial decay in the North? Do the material conditions of Manchester encourage a focus on mundanity and decay?
TH: I guess [they] might. Yeah, I guess. I’d never actively thought about it in that way because I just paint what’s around me. But I guess being in the North, in a part of town that is decaying… I’ve never thought “Oh, you know, Joy Division sound industrial, I’ll do that because it’s a Manchester thing.” [laughs]
PM: I mean, that’s good. [laughs]
TH: Yeah I’ve never had that connection. I think if I went to live somewhere else or had a residency somewhere, say in the Mediterranean, for a long enough period of time for me to find my surroundings interesting… Whenever I go on holiday, I always think “Oh, I’ll go on holiday and get loads of inspiration,” but I don’t get any. I don’t get anything from it apart from, say, looking at works in museums. But when I come here, everything’s interesting again. So maybe if I moved to Greece for a year, then I would start to paint… Greece [laughs]. There’s nothing about my work which is attached to Manchester forever, you know, like it’s a “Manchester Thing”. It’s just where I live.
PM: This latest set of work, Displays, has this throughline of the shutter which is in contrast to your earlier work. Was that deliberate and how do you view these works in the context of your past work?
TH: It was deliberate. Before, I’d often make a work and then see variations of the work I could make. But then I’d be like, well, I’ve already made this work, so I don’t wanna do it again. I would jump around quite a lot. Whereas now I’ve realised [they were] missed opportunities to explore something. So, yeah it was an active decision to go deeper into something. And I’ve really enjoyed it to be honest. It’s been kind of freeing.
PM: The colour green, as well, is quite a prominent part of the work. Is that conscious?
TH: To be honest, no, because they always start off different colours. Like, on that one [points to a canvas propped up against the wall], that whole shutter was red. You can see the red bits creeping through, and the orange bits on that side. So I start, generally with a warmer color, or blue. Often they start like a huge messy array of colors. And then, yeah, I don’t know how the green happens… [laughs] it just does.
I have an obsession with this Elsworth Kelly painting called Orange and Green which is literally just two forms of orange and green, and I just adore that colour combination. So a lot of my works end up orange and green, like I’ve got an obsession with how, you know, obviously the complementary of green is red, but then it’s shifted. It’s like what I was saying before about the jazz note. I see it as jarring. [Red and green] would be harmony, which is kind of more difficult to enjoy.
PM: I like that, that the green’s within you and it just comes out every time.
TH: Yeah, against my will [laughs].
PM: One thing I thought was really interesting: in an old interview, you said that you don’t use reference images and you paint mostly from memory.
TH: Yes, well, a mixture. Yeah, I still do that. I’ve always used a collage of found imagery, referencing the things I invent, and photographs that I take are slowly creeping in. I didn’t use them before. It was only for the last show that I used photographs I’d taken myself.
PM: Do you have a preference for painting from memory, do you think there’s a benefit to working from memory over using reference imagery?
TH: Yeah. Definitely. Because often the photographs, to me, can be super cluttered and over-detailed, and the light is wrong, or the angle is wrong in relation to the other things painted. And, sometimes, I just cannot find what I’m after, but I know roughly what I want, so I can just invent it in my brain. Obviously that only applies to certain things. Like I couldn’t… I don’t know… I could probably give most things a bit of a go… ish.
PM: I think I’d find that really frustrating, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to realise what’s in my head. Or is that part of the process? Memory being a bit fallible and fuzzy?
TH: Oh, yeah, very much so. I’ve not got a photographic memory. It’s often about just beginning. Which I guess comes through practice. As a beginner, just starting is scary. I literally just begin, and if what I’m making looks absolutely terrible, I just use cloths and erase it, and work more into it, and eventually I’ll get there. To start without the knowledge of how to fail correctly, that would be pretty daunting – I know how to save it [laughs].
PM: Do you have any inkling of where your work is going next? What might change or which direction you might go in? Or is that largely subconscious?
TH: I have ideas, yes. I’ve been painting these shutters for a while. I feel like they’re quite claustrophobic. So I see myself in the next body of work shifting towards something more spacious as opposed to this super flat, to-the-plane imagery. Even the bits of space in the most recent work, you know, I think you can tell that there’s stuff behind, even if it’s mist. I often paint pipework and things behind, like they’re enclosed. It’d be a breath of fresh air to open up a bit.
That’s the way I want to go, and I think the subject can either remain the same or change… It’s a formal thought as opposed to a “Oh, I really want to shift my subject matter now,” it’s more of a: change my palette, change the way I use masses and space and light and shadow, and just work out the correct vessel to do what I want with those. If that makes sense?
PM: I guess even the window there [points to a new, unfinished piece in the studio] is a shift away from the shutter, because it’s like you’re looking at it at an angle.
TH: Yeah, yeah. It’s because these [points to paintings similar to those in Displays] are completely flat, and that one’s in perspective. I photographed it from an angle, so it’s a bit more dynamic. And I guess, because these are perfect squares, that is still a square but warped slightly. It’s angled and tilted back, trying to find the tenser shape.
PM: Is that flat-on view at all architecture related: elevations, orthographics and stuff? Or do you just like the head-on view?
I don’t know. It could be, but generally I think of it as working direct to the picture plane. A lot of my favorite painters work with it. When you start painting, all you have is the format and the flatness of the surface. So I like to work with that. I could take a photograph and just paint it as I want, but [that] doesn’t address the formal facts of what you’re doing. Obviously, the lines are vertical and horizontal. So, to me, that’s a kind of tense way of dealing with it, I guess… I’ll see.
Pete Mercer is a designer and writer based in Leigh, Lancashire. Pete is founder and editor of northern cultural publication, STAT.
Displays is on at GRIMM from 10 April to 31 May 2025.
This interview has been commissioned by GRIMM.