Lavinia HARRINGTON

This monumental pastel work was completed in 2024 and is the first of three works of that year that share the same title, which is inspired by a line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s early poetry collection The Book of Hours, written between 1899 and 1903 and published in 1905.

In a recent statement, Harrington has written that she is ‘moved by how soft, vulnerable materials can hold and emanate deeply charged emotions. Through making, [I am] searching for ways to materialise sensation. The works that grow from this are not representations but embodiments. Questions of care and empathy, reciprocity and sustainability are at the heart of [my] practice…[My] works emerge from an accumulation of action and erasure, contemplation and somatic movement, and are guided by visceral reactions to colour…Above all, [my] practice is sustained by a desire to engage with and share our astonishing capacity to empathise and connect with the living world.’