Formed from paper, ink, crystal and crushed glass, Untitled exemplifies Hilary Harnischfeger’s unique, intricately handmade approach to abstraction. Her sculptures and wall reliefs eschew the typical media and techniques of fine art, incorporating elements more often found in practices of ceramic, mosaic and jewellery-making. Dense and multi-layered, they possess a delicate chromatic and textural fascination, their harmonic forms the result of a complex, improvisatory accretion of disparate parts. Born in Australia, Harnischfeger lives and works between Brooklyn and Granville, Ohio, a clay-rich region with a great diversity of earth minerals and sedimentary formations. Dying, casting, staining, firing, glazing, collage and the recycling of offcuts from past projects all have a role in the near-architectural building of her works. Untitled looks almost like a colour-coded relief map, its stacked strata of paper echoed by drawn contour lines in fine ink. Washes of red and dark purple give way to pastel promontories of peach and white, which jut onto pale plains of lavender; a delta of eau-de-nil shimmers with the mineral glint of glass and mica; fluorite crystals sparkle with light, their glints and facets mirrored in geometries of violet line that flash across the work’s surface.
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