harriet

words, ink, clay, plants, feelings

Hi I’m Harriet!

I am an artist, writer, researcher, community archiver, gardener, and dreamer living in Amsterdam.
Love, grief, pleasure, intimacy, and connection guide my artistic practices.
I work with clay, writing, illustration, plants, fungi, and gathering people together to capture imprints of moments in time and share thoughts, dreams, and experiences.

I am interested in memory, as fragile, subjective, and relational to power, culture, and feelings. As I witness oppressive systems becoming increasingly and visibly violent, I wonder how we will collectively and individually remember, and how we will cope with our inheritance of climate, capitalist, and (neo)colonial crises. I believe art as a grounding and expressive practice can be an important tool in liberation movements.

I love clay’s connection to space and time, to past, present, and future, the slow process of making, and the connection to earth, air, water, and fire. My recent psychedelic ceramics attempt to capture chaos and embrace uncertainty, developing as a distinctive style during the COVID-19 pandemic. From this I developed workshops as I am interested in knowledge-sharing and facilitating moments of connection and creativity. I will explore collective creation further during my residency at StrandLAB in 2024, where I bring an interest in the occult and esoteric to create a three-part art-based ritual inviting the local community to share feelings of grief while creating an artwork together. Additionally in summer 2024 I begin special play with clay sessions for collective creation and destruction.

I am increasingly curious how we embrace, accept, and build resilience for change and precarity, thinking-with the more-than-human and stemming partly from an interest in the works of adrienne maree brown, Octavia Butler, and Donna Haraway. Being able to acknowledge and feel grief together is one possible step. My current work focuses on grief, plants, fungi, storytelling, and mythologies. I am also continuously developing my technical knowledge working with clay and different firing methods.

Future dream art and research projects include collectively exploring ceramics as a transmitter of cultural memory, how (neo)colonialism impacts ceramics as cultural items and exploring how and if ceramics might change as a result of climate crises and overconsumption.

In my writing practice, I acknowledge a desire to live an enchanted, compassionate, caring, and creative life in relation to all life around us; I celebrate queer interconnected ecologies and ecosystems.

Current themes in my work include grief, pleasure, intimacy, contemporary spiritualities, and making kin with the more-than-human as part of queer(ing) ecologies.

My studio and the home of earthcraft is located in OAZO in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam Zuidoost.