Britt Harrison "Tripping Over The Moon"

Britt Harrison "Tripping Over The Moon" 2025

Painting, Oil on Custom Panel
Dimensions 21 x 21 inches
Unique
Signed on verso

Britt Harrison is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator originally from North Carolina. Her work considers transitions, temporal shifts, and the ways the natural world can alter perception. Through custom-designed wood panels, ceramics, and installation, Harrison explores water as both a physical and psychological space—a place for reflection, transformation, and moments when the familiar begins to feel unfamiliar.
 Growing up in North Carolina, Harrison developed a deep connection to water, from inland rivers and lakes to the Atlantic coastline. She later spent seven years in Los Angeles, where the Pacific became another constant presence in her life. Across both coasts, water became a place of grounding and clarity, capable of slowing thought and bringing greater awareness to the present. Now based in Brooklyn, where access to nature feels less immediate, she finds herself paying closer attention to fleeting encounters: a cloud reflected in a puddle, a bird's shadow passing across water, an unexpectedly beautiful sky, or the shimmer of a mirage in summer heat.
 
These moments form the starting point for much of Harrison's work. Rather than reproducing what she observes, she distills and alters it. Soft gradients mimic changing skies and shifting light, while repeating patterns and simplified forms move increasingly away from organic representation. Nature becomes sweeter, stranger, and more ordered—a space suspended somewhere between reality and imagination. Like memory or dreams, the paintings edit the world rather than reproduce it exactly.
 
Dimensionality is central to Harrison's process. Her panels are digitally designed and CNC-cut into fluid, organic forms derived from reflections and shadows observed in nature. Moving beyond the traditional rectangle allows the wall to become part of the composition: negative space surrounds and moves through the forms, while shadows extend their presence into the surrounding environment.
 
At the center of Harrison's practice is an interest in attention. The natural world is constantly changing, offering small markers of time that can easily pass unnoticed. By isolating and extending these fleeting experiences through painting, Harrison creates space to linger with them. Her work considers how observation can become a form of reflection, inviting moments of stillness, wonder, and renewed awareness of the physical world.

Britt Harrison earned her BFA in Painting and BS in Psychology from UNC Wilmington in 2011. She continued her artistic education through coursework at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Harrison also holds an MPS in the Business of Art and Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Harrison is the Director of under the pale blue, a contemporary gallery in Queens, New York, and the Residency Director for Hidden Hills in Asheville, North Carolina.

Tripping Over the Moon
 
Tripping Over the Moon reflects on the quiet wonder of looking up at the evening sky, when the first stars appear, porch lights begin to glow, and the moon slips into view almost unnoticed. These small atmospheric moments often pass without our attention, yet they have the power to interrupt the rhythm of everyday life.
 
The work preserves one of these fleeting encounters, extending a moment that would otherwise disappear. Its irregular form removes the scene from a traditional landscape and allows it to exist more like a fragment of a memory or daydream.
 
The painting asks us to slow down long enough to notice the extraordinary within the ordinary. Like a daydream, it celebrates moments when the natural world quietly shifts our awareness, reminding us that wonder can come simply from seeing the familiar with renewed attention.