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Kirsty Harris’ new exhibition meditates on the exact split second that represents our race to self-destruction
Image: Charlie by Kirsty Harris, 2017, oil on un-stretched linen, 69x112ins. Photo courtesy of the artist
A graduate of the Sir John Cass School of Art, Kirsty Harris is a Yorkshire lass who lives and works in London with numerous world-wide exhibitions to her name. Her artworks are held in private and public collections internationally including at The National Atomic Testing Museum, Nevada. No surprise then that her exhibition A Foul And Awesome Display meditates on the exact split second that represents our race to self-destruction and focuses on ‘the decisive moment’.
Confrontational and vast, her paintings of nuclear bomb tests depict these moments of manufactured violence. One of which, entitled Charlie, represents four tons of TNT in each square inch of linen, the unit of measurement that denotes the yield of an explosion.
Her interactive pieces pack a hearty gut-punch, and include a 1950’s rotary telephone which plays a musical account of every recorded nuclear explosion; projections conveying the after-effects; instructional artwork that references Oppenheimer’s attempt to poison his tutor at Cambridge University, and a transcript of the first broadcast of an atomic explosion.
