About Jennifer Leigh Harrison

“Jennifer Leigh Harrison is an extraordinary artist based in Seattle on the West Coast of the United States whose oeuvre includes both painting and performance. I mean in the sense that Jackson Pollock’s paintings were a “performance.” Harrison has created a body of work in the past year (2024) which would seem to be the culmination of years, or even decades, of toiling in the studio - but here they are, completely fresh, a newcomer to the art world after a career in psychotherapy. One is slightly in awe.”

— Anthony Fawcett, London

“Jennifer Leigh Harrison’s oeuvre represents a visceral dialogue between the body, space, and the complexity of human emotion. Her work delves into themes of embodiment, survival, and the layered dynamics of time, consistently challenging the viewer’s perception of reality and abstraction. The physicality with which Jennifer Leigh Harrison approaches her canvas—eschewing traditional tools for more industrial materials like steel, cloth, knives, and wood—imparts a raw energy and intensity that underscores the emotional and thematic weight of her creations. [Her] art draws a deeper parallel to the body and its engagement with space—there is a bodily rhythm in her work, an intuitive interplay between movement and stillness.”

— Contemporary Art Collectors

Jennifer Leigh Harrison is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, social worker and psychotherapist who works with performance art, installation, critical essay, poetry and painting.  She is known for using her intuitive body and raw emotion to create large scale gestural abstract paintings that are thought provoking. Through an intersectional ecofeminist lens, she invites the public to consider the impact of hegemonic systems on gender and ecology while exploring themes of collective and interpersonal trauma, attachment, invisibility, power, resiliency and resistance. Her work often challenges worn narratives and false binaries through improvisational acts of violence, deconstruction, play and chaos that allow for regenerative discoveries that parallel the challenges and opportunities of healing both body and land.

In her oeuvre ‘Hystérie: Architectures of Confinement’, her large scale painting ‘Rewilding’ was the culmination of intense physical hours on the floor layering, stripping back, and running paint through a needle-nosed application that created a still scarred and destructed, but transformed image of new beginning in response to the sublimated rage Harrison explored in her figurative and abstract paintings as part of the exhibit.

A recipient of the Marian Coe Scholarship award for creative writing, Harrison’s work is internationally published in journals and anthologies. She is the author of the chapbook, Places We Left, published by Dancing Girl Press. Her writing has been a subject in her solo exhibits.