Henrietta harris biography

Henrietta Harris (b. 1984) is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She has exhibited widely—particularly in Australasia and the United States—and has produced artwork for diverse publications and commercial clients. Throughout her career, her practice has been characterised by precise technique and psychological intensity. She often depicts individuals at the crossroads of early adulthood, in states of uncertainty or isolation—self-scrutinising and scrutinised by others.

Harris’s earliest works were executed on paper and tended to disrupt the usual access point to emotion, the face. She made pen drawings of people with visages barren of features but surrounded by lyrical waves of hair, requiring viewers to find different means of reading temperament, or to project attitudes of their own. Using watercolour, she played with faces in other ways, multiplying them or stretching them like taffy, such that they we