For Miart, Milan 2024 Cooke Latham Gallery presented a solo booth of sculptural and relief works by Lisa-Marie Harris, titled 'Highly Strung.'
The project centred around a deconstructed child's balance bike titled 'Brace' (2023) a work previously shown in 'The Pusher and the Pull', the artist's institutional exhibition at Lightbox (July-Oct 2023). 'Brace' encapsulates the repetition, instability, and unending monotony of female labour in motherhood. The familiar structure is unravelled, rendered useless, brimming with the tension of potential yet frustratingly impossible movement.
'Brace' was surrounded by several of Harris' linen and stretched leather relief panels, including new works created in response to the work for its installation at Miart. These reliefs mirrored the implied tension in 'Brace' with the presence of a 'sinew' that either uncomfortably splices into the leather forms or appears to constrict them into a cinch or pinch. Employing an alluring 20th century monochromatic visual language, the viewer is pulled in by the familiar and exquisitely presented abstract forms. There is, however, a violence to these compositions that upon closer examination makes for uncomfortable viewing, with the works seeking to locate and release the flesh memories repressed within a woman's body. Supple leathers are pulled taut to an apparent 'breaking point', reflected in the reconstructed bike that they surround, before being hand sewn in the repetitive, exacting manner expected of 'womanly' work. The result is a restrained and searing exploration of the mothering woman's body, rendered in abstract form.
