Britt Harrison "Drifting In The Troposphere"

Britt Harrison "Drifting In The Troposphere" 2025

Painting, Oil on Panel
Dimensions 21 x 17 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.

Drifting Into the Troposphere
 
Drifting Into the Troposphere presents an idealized, almost cartoon-like version of a cloud passing through a warm summer sky. The colors remind me of the impossibly bright popsicles from an ice cream truck—the kind saturated with pinks, blues, greens, and yellows so vivid they barely seem like they could exist in nature. There’s something nostalgic and slightly unreal about them, like a childhood memory of summer made more colorful over time.
 
The repeating lines create a rhythmic pattern across the surface, suggesting rain while moving away from a literal depiction of weather. The cloud itself is reduced to an outline, leaving the wall visible through its center and allowing the surrounding space to become part of the image.
 
The painting begins with something familiar in the natural world but pushes it toward something imagined. The colors become sweeter and more saturated and the rain more rhythmic, creating an edited version of nature shaped as much by memory and daydream as by observation.