Rebecca Harvey was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1961 and currently lives and works south of the river in London. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work revolves around questions of the domestic and posits of a way of looking at decorative art that reveals hidden fears and desires. She is particularly interested in how collective ideas shape and mold our perceptions of the world and how these new perceptions are reflected in the environments we construct for ourselves. Her work is based in the residue, both physical and intangible, of objects.
Project-based sculptural work reflects the implications of place on process and materials as well as the sea of image and meaning that forms the ways that objects carry, create, and compound meaning. Numerous awards include several Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, Greater Columbus Arts Council Award and International residencies in countries from Sweden to China, Canada to Italy and Iceland to Germany. She regularly writes about the intertwined histories of the decorative arts, and articles featuring her work have appeared in Studio Potter and American Craft.
Artist Statement
My research revolves around questions of the material object and is based in the residue, both physical and intangible, of objects. Studio work has long been both project and place-based, centered in the orchestration of objects. I measure and balance, parts are formed, colored, and placed; lines are created between and through shapes. My practice lays a line of abstraction and chance, reconstructing and reworking, using common objects to re-illustrate the world. I play with reflection and absorption, using one to measure the other, lining and misaligning shape and surface. Sometimes the arrangement pulls together and just holds, flickering but impermanent, just beyond the grasp of understanding, an almost thing. I poke and prod material and form, coaxing it into a new existence. I think of lines across a landscape, watch the shadows made by clouds.
My work beginnings with a broad range of experiments and responses, an uncovering of possible paths. I am looking at the way a material curls as it dries, or color shifts based on absorption. I am intent on materials at hand, be they paper wrappers or sticks bits of string. And then I think, and not just with my head but with my hands and my body, pulling and twisting and bending shapes into form.
I am interested in the arrangement and placement of objects and in the relationship between the container and the container, exploring the border between an object and its interior. I dissolve objects, reconstitute them, cover them in layers and rearrange. My arrangements are often minimal, bits colored and placed, lines created between shapes. Using a combination of found and made objects both as creations and recreations, I combine and strip forms to create new relationships influenced by the materials at hand and the environment in which I move through daily.
