Harry Adams

Harry Adams is the art name of collaborative painters Steven Lowe and Adam Wood, who started working as Harry Adams in 2008 and with which they have exhibited both solo and in groups around the U.K. The two artists have collaborated together in activities as diverse as music, painting, drawing, film, performance, printmaking, photography, digital montage and poster design (especially the Art Hate project, in collaboration with Billy Childish), artists’ books, publishing (poetry, novels, polemics), web projects, running galleries and curating. Born in the 1960’s, Wood and Lowe, both studying painting, met in art school in 1988. Throughout their time in art school, Lowe and Wood collaborated, but when forced to present the final assessments individually, one passed and one failed. This moment rendered the idea of success in, their eyes, as pointless and hence their work possesses an air of irreverence and defiance, notable through the blending of techniques such as screen-printing and painting, encaustic painting and the use of wood instead of canvas as a material.

Harry Adams’ paintings are landscapes, though they are not of the pastoral sort. Skies are unrealistically orange, yellow, red, white and green, the hues oversaturated, contrasting with dark landscapes of mountains, monoliths, foliage and trees. The British landscape is used as an inspirational background, its bucolic aura tempered by overlays and vibrant, prismatic forays into abstraction with paint. Inside these coloured areas, the viewer can, much like with clouds, make out certain shapes or forms that may or may not have been intentional. Ideas of creation and destruction are central to Harry Adams’s paintings where there is belief and disbelief, beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, dirt and cleanliness, and ecstasy and dysphoria. They summon and combine these polarities as dualities or paradoxes of discord and unity, and then evade tidy meanings, or deliberately misplaces conclusion. Huge architectural monoliths are depicted, whose important survival or cultural functions, as repositories, have their already complex meanings disrupted in further ambiguities of moral scale. Adams’ work demonstrates the chaotic creative process and collaboration between the two – the anarchic nature of the production of the works is notable in Harry Adams’ style – the application of the paint, rough, and quick, whilst the absence signs of life in Adams’ works gives their oeuvre a dystopian, post-human ambience.

“On being commissioned to make a series of paintings for the Retreat Group Hotels, we made two “pilgrimages” to the area for research and image gathering purposes.

Notwithstanding the unique natural beauty of the area, we became intrigued/obsessed with several aspects of this strange peninsula at the furthest corner of Wales.

Firstly, that the Romans referred to it as ‘The Promontory of the Eight Perils’ then the role of St David’s as a holy city and place of pilgrimage (2 pilgrimages to St David’s equalled 1 to Rome), and in turn how that coexisted with trading routes connecting Ireland with the rest of the world and led to the developments of its coastal industries. This rich mix of history and intrigue heightened by the sense exposed isolation on the peninsula and rewilding of the landscape as the evidences of past glories collapsed and sunk back into nature. But what really rocked our brains was the Bomber Runway and other evidences of military activity from WWII, located there to evade German attack and provide listening posts for enemy activity with Carn Llidi being the site of an early warning radar facility. To us they all carried the same weight and romance as ancient ruins and told stories of the areas psycho-geographical character.

Lastly, we loved the story of the old windmill at the heart of the new hotel and how the original owner had died from “disappointment” after the roof blew off in a storm.
We headed back to our London studio armed with hundreds of photographs and buzzing with a confusion of ideas.

Over the next few months we painted and painted. Making as many works as we could, one leading to the next and running with whatever came to mind.”