A Royal Drawing School graduate, Rebecca Harper creates large-scale paintings that blend dream-like motifs with ordinary scenes from everyday life. She sees her paintings as a stage, which looks compassionately at settlement, and deals with the many paradoxes within identity and belonging.

Harper says: “What always seems to underpin the work I make is a sort of ‘diasporic consciousness’, which can often involve a multiplicity of belonging and sense of difference, one of ‘otherness’ and displacement. The identity of the displaced positioning is a paradox between location and dislocation, out of place everywhere and not completely anywhere. This viewpoint frames expressions of ‘being’ within the work, spiritually, metaphorically, literally, it all manifests itself in my paintings as an unfolding, wondering, allegoric commentary on the locations I inhabit, both internally and that which surround me.”

She adds: “Characters often fill in for people I know well, they inhabit and travel like chameleons, morphing through varied landscapes, taking on different guises to explore the complexities around the notion of perspectives and relationships that exist between belonging and displacement.”

Since graduating, Harper has had three UK solo presentations with Anima Mundi Gallery, and solo presentations at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, Mayfair. Her work can next be seen at Islington Arts Factory from 10-16 September in ‘Women Celebrating Surrealism’, curated by Jenny Blake, followed by a solo show at Spurs Gallery, Beijing.

Harper is also currently working on a commission for Merton College at Oxford University, featuring three women. She adds: “I am very happy to be helping out and putting women on their walls. It’s been wonderful to work on as a commission, it is rare for me and has taken me out of my own studio practice, which has been refreshing.”