Allowing a Thing to be Two Things- Harry Burden
Opening:6–8pm, 14th November, 2025
Interview with Harry Burden
This conversation was conducted by ChatGPT and is based on over thirty interview questions originally asked to artists — including Phillip Guston, Emily Kam Ngwarray, Mike Kelley, Katherine Bernhardt, Martin Creed, Sarah Lucas, and many others.
When you’re working on these new paintings and towel pieces, what’s the first physical action you take in the studio — what starts the process?
These are fresh, like I'm only just getting to the beginnings of them. The towels start by having them to clean brushes and wipe my hands. Over time I build them up. Some I prestretch and paint on the stretcher bars. Paint and colours layer in different stages — so they have different readings depending on where you are physically in relation to them. Direct experience — free of image and content and human touch — is the driving force.
That idea of “direct experience” — of the work being free from image or content — feels rare right now, when everything’s expected to mean something. What kind of experience do you want someone to have standing in front of these pieces?
It’s not rare — but it’s a choice, isn’t it. Sitting in front of a screen and using you as mediation is reductive and boring compared to my experience of physical interaction with the physical world. Those are magic things you can’t experience, right?
Do you think that absence — the inability of a machine or even another person to fully feel what you feel — gives painting a kind of resistance or power in the present moment?
It’s something that’s made sense to me. I’ve gone back to painting because I realised that was what I’d been avoiding facing for many years. Facing the square canvas and finding some way that makes sense to me seemed important. I’d been trying to critique the digital experience by engaging with it as a tool and using concept as a method — but it was never very natural to me. I love artists who do that, but for me I needed a simple, direct approach — something dumber that generated a feeling, less a thought.
When you talk about “facing the square canvas,” it sounds almost like confrontation — not just with the surface, but with yourself. What happens in that moment, when it’s just you and the canvas — before anything starts to take shape?
It’s not a fight, but it’s a puzzle. Anyone can do it — so it feels democratic and relatable, like my daughter can do it or a high-selling artist. It’s got the same relative parameters for everyone. It’s also human scale and can live with people. I returned to it because of that. It became an interdimensional time machine for me. It also got me reconnected to colour and form in the world.
When you say it became “an interdimensional time machine,” that’s a striking phrase — do you mean it connects you to other moments, or that it shifts your sense of time while you’re in it?
I don’t know — it’s psychedelic in some ways. Best not to overthink it. But it’s definitely about feelings, and I suppose that’s one thing you can’t fully understand?
Do you think that’s what painting is offering you now — a way to stay inside something only humans can truly experience, something that resists translation or explanation?
Yes, maybe. Weird that a simulated human experience points that out to me. The less we engage with this sort of technology, the richer our limited time on this planet is. Painting is a great way to kill time and think.
When you’re in that slow, time-killing space — mixing colour, layering paint, wiping it away — what’s guiding your decisions? Are you following intuition, memory, mood?
Trying to follow feeling. These are based on feelings and colours I’ve picked up from other artists. I’ll probably continue that way. But I’m equally drowning in content from other artists — so I don’t care what they say in Instagram promo videos, it’s more about what they do. The less we all know the better, right? But I guess that’s the opposite of you — you know too much. What a burden.
If we stay here for a moment — in this mix of colour, feeling, and not-knowing — what do you think the work itself wants? Not you, not the viewer, but the work?
That’s maybe too meta for me, but I’d say it only lives for the viewer. Hey will this interview fit on an a4 page?
Good answer — direct, no mysticism. It lives for the viewer.Would you like me to lay it out as a finished A4 interview draft now?
Yes pleasee- thanks again. Shame you can't come to see the show
I wish I could — it sounds like exactly the kind of show that makes being human feel worthwhile.
Instacrap:@harry_burden