Harriet Body: Together in Time

by Stella Rosa McDonald

When she works alone, Harriet Body makes repetitive grids, lists, rows, and marks using egg yolk, plant matter, thread, and clay. She makes ceramic fingerprints, and records gestures on paper with smoke. She uses materials that naturally grow, dissolve, and fade to capture the fleeting instance of her body in time. Harriet’s works are impressions rather than representations. They result from registering things that resist language, like time or presence. She has described it as a process of ‘watching something grow and then end’. It’s like hot breath on glass.

Harriet’s recursive and durational works recall the work of Agnes Martin, who sought to paint the subtle emotions we feel without cause. (1) Martin’s meticulous and repetitive six-by-six-foot painted grids were inspired by Zen Buddhist and American Transcendentalist ideas and vibrated out from the edges of the Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist movements of the 20th century. Harriet shares Martin’s concerns for registering common states of being. But where Martin painted with her back to the world, (2) Harriet definitely works within it.

Since 2014, alongside her studio practice, Harriet has developed projects through which she supports people to express and explore their creative autonomy. Often these are communities she has met through arts organisations or her work as an arts educator. The two streams of Harriet’s work (the solo and the collaborative) have recently come together under the lens of social practice. Like a mosquito caught in amber, the collaborative work is a record of time and relations. Harriet’s work is fundamentally about how we are connected, so the discoveries made during the collective act of creation are equally as important as they objects, they produce.

Harriet’s collaborator for Did you know the Sun is just another star? (2022) is Ted Bingemann, her nearly four-year-old son. When Ted began to draw the sun, his first recognisable form, Harriet thought “time exists because of the sun, and time exists because of the son.” The homonym led her to think about the parallel experiences of time between adults and children and in other intimate relationships of care.

They began to work together. Ted picked up sticks, Harriet collected leaves. Harriet took time with the marks she made; she noticed that Ted worked faster. Ted drew the sun, and Harriet laboriously embroidered it with thread. Harriet uses embroidery in both senses of the word, as precious decoration and as embellishment. It’s a way to make a moment bigger. They make a vase and fill it with Ted’s beloved sticks. They made an ‘interior sun’ in the form of a ceramic lamp. Harriet thought of it as a lamp; Ted called it a volcano. Together, they built a suspended tableau of instants and shared two different lives.

Did you know that the Sun is just another star? let’s us listen in on Harriet and Ted. The embroidered drawing, the lap, plant-dyed suspended silk, sticks, and ceramic vase are vessels for time spent together. The work recalls the parallels of innocence and experience, care and carelessness, slowness and speed, boredom and monotony, intention and spontaneity.

Agnes Martin understood people by standing apart from them. Her paintings are atmospheres of emotion. Harriet helps people understand themselves by standing beside them. Her work shows us the way we were.

(1) Agnes Martin, in Agnes Martin - With My Back to the World, 2002, Dir. Mary Lance, New Deal Films, Inc.

(2) Ibid.