A portentous hand points out, seemingly to nothing from a cerulean drape. Framed by drawn stage curtains, a toilet peers out from the shadows behind greenish, rusting metal rolling shutters. A headless figure likewise peers out from those acidic metal shutters, dressed in a gown from sometime bygone, and holds a string that crosses horizontally across its midsection.

There’s an eerie sense of suggestion to these images—but like the hand, they seem to point directly to something unseen, intangible, a mood. Each element in these paintings by the Manchester based Tommy Harrison, from ominous objects to unlikely settings, from varying brushstroke styles to a profusion of layers of color, is in a state of tension with one another. We spoke with Harrison about his current show Displays at GRIMM in London, and how this holistic sense of tension can be carried across a body of pictures.

I was thinking about your background in architecture and how you’ve said that you're interested in the balance of the canvas. Can you speak to the relation of your architecture career and your paintings?

I actually studied Landscape Architecture, so I focused heavily on soft materials; plants and trees mostly. I was always very ecologically minded. That comes naturally to me, but I had some great teachers who brought it out further. Nigel Dunnett for example, he designed the Olympic Park in London. Piet Oudolf was a visiting lecturer too, and he designed the High Line park. Sheffield was a great university for Landscape Architecture.

I did a lot of bird’s-eye view plans of space, in which you have to consider a design language; the space needs to be unified. I guess you’d ideally avoid having a sharp angle and then a curved line in close succession for example, especially if the space was small. There was always a distribution or balance that you’d be considering. Things need to go in the right place and make a satisfactory whole. Maybe my interest was born from this.

It's interesting what you just said, because in your canvases, you strike this balance between rectilinear and organic forms. How do you consider the balance between ways of handling paint? Some objects have an airbrushed quality versus a very painterly application, like with feathers or fur. Is that also part of the balance aspect?

Definitely. That probably has less to do with a systematic placement, and more to do with an intuitive sense. I build paint up in many ways. Sometimes for example, I lightly dab it, so it just catches the teeth of the weave, allowing the layer beneath to shine through. However, if I do that too much, it can be bombastic and then I want something else painted a bit softer or milkier.

Equally, if there’s not enough going on, I have to add something with a different temperament, quicker flicks of grass or fluffy plant heads or something, bird feathers too. It's constantly “does this area sit right,” so I have to add or remove things as it progresses.

Has your approach always been to start on the canvas then adjust and move the elements? Did you ever start with a study? How did you figure out that this is the best way to go about it?

I started off doing studies a couple of years ago, and I've tried since (as I sometimes feel like it could make my life a lot easier). However, it just doesn't work. I don't know why; I just can't. Firstly, I don’t find it particularly exciting, just transferring a drawing. I also think that the scale shift makes things look wrong, a space can be too big, or an object is too small. I just find it more stimulating to work a the scale of the final painting. I also think it can lead to a more exciting place. If I was to compose on a piece of paper, I feel like I'd get there easier, whereas when it's on the canvas, things have to be removed, and then colour shines through from something painted beneath. There’s more opportunity to find things.

The idea of creating problems that then have to be solved can be generative.

You’re correct. That’s a good way of putting it.

I was also wondering how you arrived at your use of tailor's chalk. I've never really heard of someone using that as an underpainting.

I was complaining to my friend about how drawing in pencil would make the paint dirty, and he suggested tailors chalk. I immediately bought some and found that it was perfect, you can remove it with your fingers almost. It just vanishes.

So the chalk doesn't have any effect on the paint?

No, but the mark is about as thick as a pencil mark.

You were also a studio assistant for Louise Giovanelli, who you shared the complex with. I know you did have formal schooling, but I was wondering if there's anything you learned from practicing with an artist that you felt like you wouldn't have otherwise achieved.

Definitely. I think materials, for sure, and ambition. I'd learned about materials at school, but she used aluminium stretchers instead of wood, and super high-quality linen, things like that. Just seeing the ambition and the scale of things in her studio, you know, just really committing to it, made me much more ambitious in what I was making. I was working in a restaurant at the same time I was working for her. So buying those materials was financially daunting, but I just did it and took the hit. Her work ethic too is exceptional, I learned a lot from her.

What inaugurated that switch from these grander, busier scenes, to something a little bit more honed in?

In the shutter paintings I’ve been working on recently, I’m really trying to limit the ‘additions,’ trying to stay purer to the initial idea. I find doing less and holding back much more challenging, so I wanted to test myself.

It must be very different to have the work in your studio, this very industrial space, and then to see them in a gallery space. Does that ever have an effect on a body of work? Have you ever considered showing outside of a white cube space?

Yes, it is very different. However, I have only ever felt happy when seeing the work in a gallery, I find that good lighting amplifies my colour. The light in this studio has a yellow tinge to it, so they appea duller. I've never had a strong desire to show outside of a white cube space, but I would, if the lighting was good.

So what are you working on for your upcoming show with Grimm in April [Displays, 2025]?

I can give you a little tour, actually, if you'd care.

Definitely.

I've been working on a series of shutter paintings over the past year and I'm going to town with them for this show. I haven’t shown these double shutters before; they are wider but still 2m in height.

Traditionally I’ve worked with found images- usually from art history- but in this show, photographed elements from my daily life are moving into the work. This car here [Display IV, 2025] is just a crashed-up car from outside my studio, and I have no idea why it's there. It's just been there for years, and no one has any clue what happened to it. Over time I have found it very stimulating, it raises lots of questions. Equally, it’s certainly visual evidence of a pretty harrowing event. I find it eerie. But it marks the first time I’ve worked directly from a photograph that I've taken myself, something which I’ve found exceptionally freeing. So I plan to do more of that going forward.

Display IV, 2025
oil on linen, 200 x 270 cm

Photography: Michael Pollard

In some of your early work, for example the Kafka painting and the hung thief [String Vibrating in the Mist], there's a brief period where you involve the figure, and then there's a period where the figure becomes more of a suggestion than a central point, like with the woman’s arm in Corridor ii [2023].

Now you’ve just done that painting for that self-portrait show at Grimm [Self-Portraits, 2024], is the figure moving slowly back into your work? I’m thinking of that work you have there in the studio, the one of Christ.

Yes, I returned to this intentionally, but also whilst maintaining the suggestive quality you mention. The work I made in-between included animals, functioning as figures. I liked this as I stopped questioning myself on who and why?

However, in time, I wanted to return to the formal and symbolic force that the figure can provide. I have only ever painted myself as a known human model.

Generally, my ‘figures’ are actually just images, mannequins or sculptures within a painting. At most they’re an extended arm or peeping hand. I do this as I want to reduce them to their symbolic and formal functions, without a larger narrative being introduced.

I love the combination of the curtains and the shutters in the same painting. The earlier works have a focus on curtains and fabric, and there are works where you're doing a lot of the shutters It seems like there's already a relationship between the two in the way they hold space on the canvas, and the rippling. Do you feel like those interests in texture are related?

Definitely. I like how the shutters are horizontal and the curtains are vertical. It's a simple contrast, enhanced by them both having rhythmic modulations in value. I often paint them flat to the plane, creating a threshold through which you can enter the illusionary portal. I find it absurd (and funny) to have the two elements- both generally used to obscure– directly in front of each other, both failing to fulfill this duty.

It’s an interesting way to compose a painting, essentially showing you something by painting something which obscures. This balance also heightens tension.

I’m glad you said that, tension is all I’m ever trying to achieve, really. However, it’s difficult when you’re balancing such a myriad of formal and conceptual factors: geometry, colour, form, space, mass, surface, line, value, subject, symbol, image, history, religion, politics… How do you balance all of this and have it feel dissonant or tense?

For my last show, there were a lot of triangular shapes, all interlocking and overlapping–triangles are really good for creating tension as they can be warped and pushed to extremes, appearing naturally off-balance. However, this show is based around squares. So the balance / off-balance is much simpler and probably more subtle. It’s much more to do with the ratios of mass and space- along with the interaction of smaller elements.

This one [Display III, 2025], for example, it just just a toilet, and the pipe is slightly tilting to one side. There’s slight differences in the tassels too. On the left there are two chords on both sides of the knot, on the right, there is only one cord wrapping around the inside of the curtain. So yeah, the tension is more subtle, but it's still the same thing I’ve always tried to do.
  

The inclusion of the toilet is funny too, because in America, I don't know if you guys have this expression, but we call it a porcelain throne.

That's what you call a toilet? [laughing]

A porcelain throne. It’s fitting to paint it surrounded by these draping curtains, “here's a throne.”

Yeah, the grandeur of curtains and the tassels, all to expose a dirty toilet. I find that contrast funny, but also conceptually paradoxical and visually jarring, two things which I guess can be intertwined.

Are these related to your paintings where it's just kind of the wall, and then there's what looks like the wall-based apparatus for a toilet [see works for Tone Cluster, Grimm, 2023]. Is that what that is?

For sure, this relates to the urinal works. Both come directly from my studio. A lot of things come from here, because I'm a human of strict routine. I get up early and I walk the exact same route across town, arriving at the same building, every day, seven days a week. Doing this, I look at the same things again and again, and with time they start to really interest me, and–in turn–I want to paint them.

For instance, the car outside of my studio, the piles of wood, even the shutters. The shutters come from all the abandoned units we have around here in the complex. It’s all from repeated visual exposure. It’s the same when I paint a crucifixion–because I look through art history books constantly–I eventually want to paint them. With time, these contrasting images and ideas merge in my mind, forming a final work I’d like to make.

Is Manchester an industrial city?

It was, but not so much anymore. I guess the Industrial Revolution started here, so Manchester is the seed of the modern world. Where I’m based is exceptionally industrial still though. A lot of the old factories and warehouses in town are flats now. Are you both based in New York?

Yeah.

I'm sure it's the same there, you know, old industrial areas are really nice now. But where we are, it’s right next to the train tracks, there's people chopping and burning stuff with the sounds of heavy industry in the air. It’s stimulating throughout the day, and eerily desolate at night, but I like it a lot.

Regarding your imagery for the compositions that have those stacks of boards and wood, you said previously that you primarily work from source imagery, but I was wondering if there are aspects of your canvas that are fully invented.

Yes, there's a lot of things which I invent, that you probably wouldn't even notice. I often invent plants and stones or things on the floor. I just completely drag them from my brain, because I can never find the right image. Equally, I never set up a mound of wood and paint it from life. Sometimes I photograph the details on my phone and collage them together as I go. The wood crept in because I moved studios halfway through making a show. I share this space with Richard Dean Hughes, and we were supposed to build a wall between us but didn’t for months, so there was just piles of wood everywhere, and again, it just crept in with time.

I was looking at the title piece for your show at Grimm in Amsterdam, Double Blind [2024]. It seems like the most Surrealist of the competitions that you’ve done. I was wondering where the inspiration for the woman figure comes from.

That was my girlfriend. There's a male head, which is Franz Kafka, but I wanted to put her in a painting. She got annoyed because I painted her perfectly in the nude, and then with time, building up the layers, she got more and more obscured by hand prints and grime. She thought I was doing it on purpose, but I had to explain that the painting calls the shots.

What do you think this body of work brings forward or changes for you from your last show?

This is definitely a step towards working more strictly in a series. Before, each work was quite different, and felt individual, whereas this is a body of work, which I think is a really nice way to paint. I think there's a shift in ambition as well. I feel like I've gotten better, technically, so I think they have a higher degree of detail and finesse to them.

And that female figure with the dress, is that a specific reference?

I actually got the dresses from the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art], in New York. There's another coming up in the London show with Grimm. I took them from mannequins. I like to make anachronistic images, so there can be ancient, Victorian and contemporary subjects, all collaged together and unified by light and atmosphere.

The fact that this may appear nonsensical, doesn’t bother me. In the show A Room Hung With Thoughts; British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, which is currently on at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, it's a mannequin which I applied flesh tones to the hands, blurring the lines between a human and artificial. It’s hard to tell what they are in the final painting and I prefer it that way.

Do you find that people want some narrative from them or ask you what it all means often?

Never, nobody’s asked me that, thankfully. Although, thinking about it, maybe my Gran has. I've never had to explain myself, which is nice. My work is never whimsical, and I know what it’s getting at, but I’d hate to have to articulate a narrative.