Caroline Jane Harris

Hi, I’m Caroline Jane Harris @cjaneharris, a contemporary artist based in London. I’ve been using the digital printing services at Photofusion for just shy of 15 years now. Thank you so much for having me to do this Instagram takeover!

Whilst my undergraduate degree was in Fine Art Printmaking, I have since completed a Masters in Fine Art and continue to explore expanded forms of image-making, through the lens of materiality, digitality and the artist’s hand. Across my practice I use personal and found images of nature, manipulating analogue and digital reproductions of broadly – air, land, or water – omitting the particulars of people and place to condense past and present.

I am taking this opportunity to share an ongoing series which I began in 2021, entitled ‘WindowSwap’. In my approach I consider both the source and physical/material origins of an image, and so this body of work came about during lockdown when a website appeared online showcasing global videos which people had made of the view through their window – “travel without moving”, it said. At this time of disconnection, I spent hours watching these videos as a form of virtual escapism, taking screenshots (cameraless photographs) of scenes that stirred a yearning for nature and empathy for people going through the same experience on the other side of the world, a sort of entanglement. In all the pieces, I manipulated the screenshots in different ways (more detail in my next 2 posts). However, each artwork is constructed from two screenshots which were digitally printed and layered. The upper layer was cut-out by hand with a scalpel, from a bitmapped version of the bottom layer, and so the negative space correlates to what is seen and revealed through the upper layer in each composition.

The beauty of these views inspired both compassion for the environment and connection to others. The process itself was like a meta meditation on the global experience of time, self, and space displaced, whilst looking to nature as a grounding constant amongst uncertainty.

Images:

1-3. WindowSwap (Glitch), (main image and details), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 65x65cm

4. WindowSwap (Fence), (installation at OHSH South), 2023, diptych of hand-cut pigment prints on Kozo paper, 123x123cm total, photo by @m8sr8s.studio

5-6. WindowSwap (Fence), (details front and back), 2023, diptych of hand-cut pigment prints on Kozo paper, 123x123cm total

7-9. WindowSwap (Screen), (installation at OHSH South and details), 2023, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 65x65cm, photos by @m8sr8s.studio

Welcome to my (Caroline Jane Harris @cjaneharris) second Instagram takeover post for Photofusion, please refer to my first post for more context on my practice and the project I am posting about ‘WindowSwap’, 2021–current.

Through my work I examine modes of looking and time, via our contemporary experience of accelerating digital overload from screens and devices. I turn towards meditative and hand-made processes to cultivate presence and peace, electing time to represent my values. Typically, I use the slow and intricate process of cutting out pixels from digital prints with a scalpel, to marry analogue and digital and materialise the immaterial. My pieces interrelate with repetitions of images and themes that loop over time and evolve with recursive connections.

For the subseries ‘Portals’, which is part of the bigger body of work ‘WindowSwap’, I framed hand-cut layered digital prints behind circular mounts. The singularity of the circle concentrates the vision by containing the viewer’s attention within one focal field, aspiring to create a domain free from distraction. From sundials and clock faces to icons prevalent in virtual reality, I consider the circle to be both an ancient and contemporary reference for the intangible and disembodied experience of time and technology.

The videos screen-captured for ‘Portals I’, ‘Portals II’ and ‘Portals (Shoji’) foreground structures that point to domestic spaces – a window frame, balcony, and door frame respectively – architectural features that traditionally separate inside from out, are dissolved into one plane in these works. Private, yet prolific in our once shared captivity. To accentuate the circular format, I cut out the upper printed layer in a fisheye bitmap pattern, sampled from the print below. Before printing, the screenshots were softened by a hazy blur in post-production (Portals I & II) or layered with translucent Asian paper (Portals (Shoji)) which, combined with the lens distortion, unsettles the clarity of the image to create both a sense of nostalgia and censored observation.

Images:

1-2. Portals I, (main image and detail), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 85x85cm

3-4. Portals II, (main image and detail), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 85x85cm

5-7. Portals (Shoji), (main image and details),2021, hand-cut layered Gampi paper and pigment print, 65x65cm

I hope you’ve enjoyed discovering my project ‘WindowSwap’, 2021–current.

In these works, I embrace the limitations of digital technology and make analogue interventions, as a means of artistic expression. In using the screenshot function, I render the images “poor” (Hito Steyerl) to heighten looking. I expose pixels to downgrade their realism, in contrast to the prolific seamless experience of photography that surrounds us. From aspect ratios to glitches or the fragility of paper, I incorporate these palpable legacies to convey the artwork’s material evolution. The intricacy of the manually cut spaces married with the low-resolution on the digital prints demand to be seen, or best of all experienced, in person, proposing seeing as a physical act.

The tightly cropped images within the square formatted works shared here were filmed vertically from the screen of a laptop playing ‘WindowSwap’ videos. I then used an application to fill in the sides of the portrait clips with gradated sampled colours, which is typically applied to homemade footage to correct the aspect ratio. The addition of the gradient margins in these works, composes a square image that conforms to social media, reflecting upon a shift in our contemporary visual consciousness.

Recently I made a new piece in this series entitled ‘WindowSwap (Fog)’, 2023; I layered hand-cut washi paper over a digital print. This work has been selected for Photofusion’s annual members exhibition ‘SALON/24’, so you will have to come and visit the exhibition to see it!

1-2. WindowSwap (Trees), (main image and detail), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 45x45cm (exhibited in SALON/22)

3-4. WindowSwap (Purple Flowers), (main image and detail), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 45x45cm

5-7. WindowSwap (Two Trees), (main image, detail and installation at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery Schloss Goerne, Germany), 2021, hand-cut layered pigment prints, 45x45cm

Images © Caroline Jane Harris.