Harriet Gillett’s practice is a response to the increasingly digitised world that blends time through the constant influx and consumption of images in the present moment. Gillett’s work attempts to slow down the increasingly fast-paced nature of our encounters and translate them into dreamlike images of reverie. She looks to offer a transitional space that is both within and beyond the viewer’s experiences by adopting a surrealistic logic to transform familiar scenes. Blurring the experienced and imagined, she works from quickly sketched impressions – often made from life, with a slower, intuitive approach to colour and light that allows for a more psychological exploration of time and place. 

Whilst holding some of its origins in well-known literary and art historical traditions that nod to various time periods, she uses a rose-tinted colour palette of fluorescent spray paint as a base. The influence of memory becomes evident in the tension between clarity and haziness; moments of emphatic line-work punctuate smoky dreamscapes where figures merge with their landscapes and thin veils of pollutant colour allows things to morph into one another. Moving between intimate, icon-like honed-in moments and scaled-up, more immersive works that lift motifs from cinema, song lyrics and traditionally devotional symbolism, the works offer a lyrical and romantic exploration of identity and the things that connect us.