To be human is to know loss in its many forms.

Following diagnosis of a chronic illness, and more recently the loss of my husband, I was yet again facing an uncertain future. I had lost my grounding and needed to dig deep in response to my inner turmoil. As I struggled to emerge from the darkness, I began to shed a light on grief through the filter of the creative process, searching for a path towards a different future.

Daily encounters with the landscape became a ritual, a pilgrimage and a search for what once existed. I hovered in a liminal space, untethered, adrift. As I resurfaced, I began to transmute the darkness of loss into something tangible. The work began to transcend, redefining meaning and purpose, and offering transformation and hope. Through paint and print I tentatively began to navigate my way back. Monoprinting offered a way of letting go of control. My experimental approach to print involves working through processes: working and reworking, embracing the imperfections and accepting the outcome, as every work is tangible, unique and human: prints leave traces, no two are the same, I am not the same as I was before.

The light began to illuminate that liminal space. The use of colour in my work was in response to emotion, energy and atmosphere. Luminosity exposes the depths of darkness and can reveal to us joy, hope and new beginnings. Time cannot heal all wounds, each sunrise illuminates the way. The greys and muddy yellows are slowly transforming into the colours of life.

Late Night Art:
Thursday 6 March 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Thursday 3 April 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Artist talk: Friday 21 March 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Monoprint workshop Thursday 10 April 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Booking required
British Sign Language interpretation.
All welcome.

Steph Harrison explores and returns to themes concerning “A sense of place”: the relationship to the landscape, memory and history. Through printmaking, mixed media and photographic references, she expresses these traces of memories through construction and deconstruction of colour, line, and mark. The artist has an experimental approach to print and embraces the imperfect process, letting go of control and perfection to discover something tangible,unique and human.

Steph was born in Belfast and now lives and works as an artist in Bangor, Northern Ireland. She is a member, former board member, and former chair of Seacourt Print Workshop. Steph facilitates classes in cyanotype, textile heat press, and screen printing techniques. She exhibits nationally and internationally, and has been the recipient of many individual and disabled artist awards. She is involved in voluntary support for wellbeing in the arts, and is a member of University of Atypical and Visual Artists Ireland.

“I paint what I find as an artefact, documenting as a reimagined memory of a place in time: the emotion, the oneness. Remembering allows concentration, my physical limitations lose importance, and I am free to ‘walk for miles in my imagination’”.