Dan Harland West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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Dan Harland (b.1990) is a painter, born and based in Leeds, U.K. He graduated from Leeds Arts University in 2018 with a first-class BA (Hons) in Fine Art. He has recently returned to his practice after a career break.

I work with the process of recollection. Memories are transcribed directly into drawings which become references for paintings. The painting is a record of a memory and it is also a record of the act of recalling it.

Memories are unreliable. Altered through years of reassessing through the lens of emotional bias. They are vague in their structure. They skip, rewind, repeat, expand and contract. Interrupted with associations of similar emotions, places and people. The gaps imagined and adopted for a future remembering. I aim to make this process visible. I use the line of my initial transcription and leave it visible. I mix illusion with flatness and materiality to collide past and present.

The content of the paintings orbit the experience of the individual as being consciously individual. Life, death, fear and sanctuary experienced by a version of me in the past and translated by the version in the present. Do we know how we felt? Have we learned lessons from an exaggerated or even incorrect memory of an emotion? I am interested in this question of reliability and it is these big, foundational memories of social navigation and uncomfortable realisations that beg to be examined. How have we got here? How real is our own idea of ourselves?

I am sat in my studio, typing this sentence, considering brackets but sticking with commas, and my whole life before this no longer exists. My past is a sequence of stories that I tell myself. Stories that bend and transform with every recollection. Stories that I have mythologised and attached grand purpose to, minimised or exaggerated to aid understanding. The intangibility of the past throws into question the validity of our memories. Equally liberating and terrifying.