John Harlan Norris

Artist Statement

While grief is notoriously difficult to pin down, one way to describe it might be as a series of interwoven contradictions. Anger and gratitude, feeling and detachment, isolation and togetherness, confusion and clarity; these and countless other seemingly opposite states become linked in curious ways. Our current collective moment feels heavily saturated with a sense of grief. Whether through a sense of personal loss emerging from the pandemic, a sense of societal unwinding as we see institutions and political systems fray, or through emerging technologies and global conflicts challenging our sense of how our lives should naturally progress, this hovering midst of grief can feel as if it is obscuring daily life for each of us in its own peculiar way.

The paintings comprising this series were created during my own period of personal grief resulting from my sister’s death by suicide. After being incapable of making work for the first year, I eventually found myself making crude, automatic sketchbook drawings unlike anything I had made before. These works were (and remain) private, and they offered an outlet for me to locate my experience in a way that words and social interactions could not. Eventually I felt the need to translate these personal transmissions into paintings, but in an altered state that might feel more appropriate for an audience. Without certainty of how to proceed, I tried putting the drawings into my computer and used rudimentary digital tools to transform them from messy, muddled sketches into simple, flat geometric forms. I found that the disarray that characterized the original sketches was now replaced with a sense of aesthetic clarity that created a kind of uncanny reflection. I then transformed these images again into large scale paintings in which their simple geometry was countered by a wide variety of marks and textures. As the surfaces of the paintings took shape, they in turn came to embody certain qualities found within the original sketchbook drawings. These paintings are populated by endless variations of a single, simplified human form that stands in for both those who have lost and those who have been lost. These forms inhabit scenarios that are both experiential and symbolic, giving shape to the strangeness that imbues daily life after of a sudden loss. I have found that, like grief itself, the process of making these works has been characterized by a series of contradictions: private and public, disarray and order, flatness and surface, presence and absence. And while this process has not led to resolution, the embrace of these incongruities has provided a form of comfort in knowing that they can coexist and communicate. My hope is that viewers can find some sense of recognition of their own grief, whatever its source may be, through engaging with this work.