| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Marcia Harris is primarily a painter of today’s changing landscape and its ecology. As works of art, they are based on what she describes as a collection of images seen, imagined or appropriated. These sources are often blended into suburbanized landscapes of the countryside around urban areas like Calgary and Kelowna. Nature and environmental issues influence their content with the motif of the tree often used as a symbol.
In an exhibition, Landscape Awareness (Art Gallery of Kelowna, BC, 2007) Harris along with Danielle Helen Ray Dickson created artwork triggered by their research into forest loss due to the Mountain Pine Beetle infestation. In these paintings, she used layered resin to create an organic blurred effect echoing the resin or sap leaking defensively from beetle-infected trees. Another series titled Colony (2008) was inspired by bees and the collapse of their colonies. Overall, her art reflects the beauty of nature and also its vulnerability.
Harris has a BFA with Distinction from the University of British Columbia-Okanagan (Kelowna, BC) where she majored in painting and drawing, screen printing and photography. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in western Canada. |