Lily Hargreaves
About
Lily Hargreaves paints scenes from an alternate timeline, her canvases inviting viewers out of their world and into one that parodies, probes, and pulls at the seams of contemporary institutions. By constructing a world of intense detail, Hargreaves exploits the omnipotence of the artist, mapping her characters’ reactions as they negotiate warps in seemingly fixed ideas like time and reality to discover new, unburdened modes of existence. Although contemporary in its concerns, her imagery is often historically inclined, playing with ideas of linearity and cyclicism as threads of past, present, and future entangle. This allows for an expanded and experimental approach to storytelling, with characters and places appearing and reappearing through different tangents of what could be a never-ending series.
The project exists as a sort of Ergodic literature, individual compositions overlapping to produce dense tableaux wherein every element is imbued with symbolic importance. Hargreaves’ theatrical approach to the installation of her paintings prompts a viewer to play an active part, investigating the images for clues from which to build their own narrative and, in turn, meaning. Overall, she celebrates the transcendent freedom of the imagination not only as a momentary escape away from a 21st century in flux, but also as a place to manifest new realities.
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Lily Hargreaves
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Lily Hargreaves
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3 questions on inspiration with
Lily Hargreaves
We're asking artists to choose one notable person, place and object that has inspired them in their journey so far. We're mapping inspiration at a scale never attempted before
Person
I'm a big fan of the so-called 'Outsider' artists so I'd probably go with someone like Henry Darger or Charles Dellschau. They were both very solitary but obsessive in their making, and I think that fact that they were making their art entirely for themselves as something to live vicariously through makes their practices very unique and powerful.
Place
The only thing that really comes to mind is when I was growing up being taken on days out to those big National Trust ancestral homes. A lot of my paintings now take place inside a manor house and I do a lot of cartoony depictions of aristocracy so I don't know if that's been a subconscious source of inspiration.
Object
Probably a bit of a boring answer but I reference books/literature a lot in my work. At the moment I've been reading a lot of Forster, Isherwood, Bowen, stuff like that as I take a lot of imagery from those, then also recently looking at more experimental plays with narrative like Joyce and Danielewski.
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