Original Painting Framed

From a collection of Oil/Paper 45cm X 53cm

Existing on the fringes of popular culture, Harker's practice often draws from a variety of image production and distribution systems in an attempt to make sense of a cosmic order becoming increasingly disordered. His paintings reflect the increasing murkiness and confusion of contemporary life, whilst remaining mindful of the dynamics of power benefiting from uncertainty. In spite of their relationship to complex, significant systemic and social issues, Harker’s work manages to retain a lightness of touch, a sense of irreverence, through the inclusion of mythical aesthetics. Unlike magical realism, however, his paintings act as thought experiments – providing the viewer with material by which interpretative systems can be created. They insist that we move beyond defined aesthetic language and into a mode of thinking capable of establishing connections between disparate chunks of metaphor, reference and symbolism as a means of better understanding the physical sensations capable of dominating experience, opinion and existence. Harker's works therefore venture into a new realm, where representations of the unreal are presented as symbols, or emissaries, of alternate understandings.