Sean Harris
Sean Harris’ practice as a visual artist and animator has been founded on collaboration with museums, research and environmental organisations and communities. In this, he has worked with the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museums of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, British Council, RSPB, Severn Rivers Trust, National Trust and many others. Since receiving a Creative Wales Ambassador Award in 2013 from the Arts Council of Wales and Welsh Government – which took him to Washington DC and North Dakota – he has sought ways to locate works in spaces beyond mainstream institutions and edifices; in woods and caves, on river banks and hilltops, in barns and churches, in sail lofts and silos, creating unexpected encounters with art in which unique resonances and dialogues are generated by the meeting of the work and its surroundings. Founded on puppet animation, moving imagery, sound and sculpture, light and shadow, analogue materials and processes are immediately evident in this work. Telling stories of the land on the land, these vessels of memory, traditional knowledge and experience are often founded on mimetic devices in which the inanimate (paper cut-outs, feathers, bones and other specimens and objects) is brought to life, expressing the anima or life force of resonant creatures in whom this lore is bound up. Extensive dialogues with academic researchers on two continents – including archaeologists, anthropologists, zoologists, palaeontologists and geologists – have exerted a powerful influence, as have the artifacts and specimens of which they are often custodian and which are powerfully manifest within his work.