Bodies 9587, 2021, India ink, photocopy ink and paper on paper, 24″ x 34″

Julie Harrison remembers clearly when she first fell in love with microorganisms. It was in 2015 at the New York Museum of Natural History’s exhibition of the human biome that she casually wandered into. “I was just instantly fascinated by the bodies of these little one-eyed tenacious animals, which is what they seemed to me.” She took photographs of the drawings and photographs of enormously enlarged single-celled microbes of all kinds, including human bacteria, which she studied assiduously. “They crawl, they eat, they move. They are vibrant objects,” she observes. Harrison went home and started drawing single-celled organisms with graphite pencil on paper.

Left: Bodies 9594, 2021, graphite, photocopy ink and paper on paper, 9″ x 12″; Right: Bodies 9566, 2021, graphite, photocopy ink and paper on paper, 9″ x 12″

“Before I started the biomorphic drawings, I had been in a trough, not sure where I was going and depressed about it,” Harrison remembers. “I always get depressed when I am not making art. And I have always worked within long projects that in some senses are singular, not just translating one idea through different mediums.”

The Global Portraits, Weather and War series had consumed her from 2003 to 2015. These were large format photographs that Harrison had created by moving a camera with a macro lens for extreme close-ups over print magazines. She had converted video to photographic stills throughout the 1990s that resulted in a limited-edition book and a trade book, both published by Granary Books. However, Global Portraits was a focused new phase with new subject matter.

Weather (series), 2014, diptych, archival pigment print, 17″ x 42″

Global Portraits: China, 2012, diptych, archival pigment print, 17″ x 42″

Initiated by her feelings about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and her dread of human on human destruction, she faced her materials in 2003, despairing as to how to make art at such a time. “I know it sounds odd,” Harrison describes, “but in some kind of grieving impulse, I picked up my camera and started moving it over the pages of news magazines, some with violent images, almost as though the camera was ritualistically healing in the way it moved over the page.” She stuck with this process, not sure where it was going. “At the local library, I pored over printed images and made hundreds of pictures capturing the folds of the magazines, the 4-color print process, the reflections. I remember a counter feeling of exhilaration at the realization that I could make multiples,” says Harrison. She then found that the resulting images were strange yet fluid. The curving fluctuations in the figures, pools of reflective light and tints of brown, taupe and disturbing orange, layering ambiguously blended frames that came about from photographing print, produced images that seem to move like television and film. Yet, by enlarging and featuring certain details, Harrison’s stills simultaneously seemed to isolate a moment — or is it an occurrence — as unsettlingly intimate and graphic as life, thereby creating photographs containing the essence of disasters, crisis, and complicated twentieth-century life without collaging or computer manipulating random, found images, or taking photographs of the subjects directly. These images are on the third circuit outside the initial photograph and its reproduction in print.

War (series), 2014, diptych, archival pigment print, 17″ x 42″

Not long before the encounter with microorganisms at the Museum of Natural History, Harrison felt she had finally completed the Global Portraits and War projects with a 2015 exhibition and catalog at a collaborative gallery, Wakalet Behna, in Alexandria, Egypt. During her tumultuous Wakalet Behna exhibition, she was exposed to tragedy in the sudden military murder of a local poet, known to her fellow Egyptian artists, while celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution. Harrison had also participated in the fortitude and resourcefulness of the small —and sometimes threatened — but vibrant artistic community. She came back to New York City feeling artistically drained.

Global Portraits: Indonesia, 2011, diptych, archival pigment print, 17″ x 42″

A pioneer in using the Sony video portapak for her work beginning in 1974, Harrison, who bought her first Macintosh in 1993 to make her digital stills, now returned in 2016 to drawing in a notebook with graphite pencil. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” she said. Yet, she noticed that in those drawings she was compelled to draw spirals, cones, and biomorphic shapes. This was an intriguing and surprising return to the organic forms that she had also explored in paint and sculpture for a phase in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Harrison grew up in a household in Rockville, Maryland, that revered painting. Her parents and grandparents all painted. “I had access to art classes which I loved and Japanese sumi paint brushes at home, also a kind of technology,” she said.

When she moved to New York City in 1976 after working with dancers in college in New Mexico, Harrison became fascinated by how the body could be used as a liberatory art tool. Eschewing traditional mediums, she intensively explored new burgeoning technologies to create art works that employed video cameras and multiple monitors that brought videotaped projections interactively into the room. She (and others she worked with including dancers such as Yoshiko Chuma) responded to the projections with improvised body movements in real time. That sequence was then videotaped to create another layer to the art process and a final product.

Live Injection Point, 1978, photograph, 12.5″ x 16.5″ (photograph of an analog monitor showing a videotape of dancers walking)

Harrison collaborated with dancers and also with other artists exploring video cameras and TV’s possibilities. A member of the famed Collaborative Projects (Colab) founded in NYC as a collective, she showed work and programmed at their cable TV channel. A founding member of Machine Language collaborative and longtime participant at the Experimental Television Center, her work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions and film screenings. Yet, Harrison stepped away in the late 1980s to intensively read art theory and do more hands on art. The flux and intensity of activist art and explorations of media plus the losses (from AIDS) of the 1980s seemed to require a new phase of art making alone. Almost as a way of renewing herself, Harrison started exploring intensively what could be done with the computer and finally with a professional printer, she moved away from painting. “I love iterations,” she has said. She felt a potential in processes of printing multiples.

Page from If It Rained Here, 1997, archival digital print with text by Joe Elliot, limited-edition book published by Granary Books

Once Harrison began to draw and study microorganisms,  past interests and forms seemed to be converging, and yet she was very much at a new threshold.

Bodies 9770, 2021, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

At first, Harrison photographed then drew the microorganisms from the photographs, bringing them into the flow of the drawings that she had been working on for a few years, but this was a fatiguing and slow process. She found that she wanted not to just document bio-organisms but to create them. “It’s not technology that primarily interests me,” says Harrison. “Nature has been a very strong element of my work and what excites me are the methods of science.” During this time, Harrison was able to visit the Micropia museum in Amsterdam, a collection of actual microorganisms stored in petrie dishes and glass vitrines. She then started printing multiples of images of microorganisms found in myriad scientific archives and online sources. By now, she was looking at images of bacterial and viral particles including brain and organ activities. She experimented and adjusted and experimented again with the materials until she discovered one day a heightened new sequence in creating a drawing. She combined the copied images of microorganisms with shards of her own biomorphic drawings in a process of composition and layering until the elements clicked into place. Graphite mechanical pencil was then used to shadow and “draw into” the array of elements and in this way a new animal was born. Each drawing contained a family of these composed microorganisms. “The duration of composition turned out to be quite lengthy and the concentration it elicited was totally new,” Harrison says. “The whole sequence put me in a mental space of flow that I’ve never experienced. I felt that it was a form of self-regulation. The drawing was crucial and purposeful outside the parameters of interrupted time.” Quite simply, these drawings of bodies brought her joy and were a healing of the wounds the past decades had brought. She decided to name this project Bodies.

Bodies 8049, 2021, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

For a visitor to Harrison’s NYC studio in Soho in July of 2021, Harrison laid out drawing after drawing until the floor was covered with large heavy paper rectangles in which the bodies seemed to swim and swirl in a silvered light, a realm that these creatures seem to vibrate within. There is no denying the repulsed feeling one initially struggles with in gazing at microbial bodies, now enlarged from invisibility to a good eight inches or more. One fears that close examination of each shape may reveal that it is faeces or partially digested food, bacteria or worse: a virulent virus. Which no doubt, some of them are. That repulsion has to be overcome. The penciled shadowing imparts an old masterpiece quality or even a texture of gelatin silver photographs to these objects, which compels them to leap forward as though in some way Harrison has haloed the most proliferative and common of life elements. Yet just because of that effect, the eye is invited in to join this world. And, after sustaining the gaze for awhile, these creatures do become the individual animals Harrison sees. A cigar-shaped column that seemed a fearsome turd is realized to be reminiscent of a sea lion happily trundling through the sea (and turns out to be a possibly life-saving new bacteria found in dirt).

Bodies 4258, 2020, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

In Bodies 4258, a chain of cervix shaped, dimpled creatures frolic near a tangle of what look like testicles and veins. One has to remind oneself that these are enormously enlarged microbes and not body parts. At the center of this drawing, a cluster of berry-sized particles leap out of a bouquet of what could be wheat stalks but aren’t.

Bodies 4229, 2019, graphite and paper on paper, 14″ x 17″

Bodies 4229 is just downright beautiful. The penciled aura around the elements are drawn particularly intensely. The core rounded shapes which could be intestinal nodes are as potent and juicy as harvest concord grapes and one microbe with streaming hair, looking for all the world like a squid (decapodoforms), propels along above the grape cluster in the upper quadrant of the paper. In this drawing as in several of the others, ball organisms imbedded with a mantle of protective spikes — or are they aggressive weapons — roll like majestic space ships through this universe. In nearly all of the drawings, elongated shapes and pocketed clusters resemble coral and bring to mind undersea creatures. One begins to see what Harrison means when she says that the organisms she constructs are a community. “Can’t everyone just get along?” she says impishly.

Bodies 4256, 2020, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

Harrison remarked that she loves to travel. Despite her life as an artist, co-parenting two progeny and her eighteen years teaching and directing the B.A. program in art and technology she founded at Stevens Institute of Technology, she found a way to live for periods of time in Guatemala and Mexico and to travel in recent years to Egypt, Brazil, Britain and within the U.S. “The differing mediums I’ve worked with over the years are like different languages,” she offers. “I feel like I am flying to another country as I work at these.” Microbes have become a language she has found and different regions of the world feature their own dialects or species or variations.

Bodies 6215, 2019, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

In 2020, Harrison was invited to a residency at the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine, where she spoke with marine biologists who were experimenting with the aquatic phytoplankton that were most destructive in their water habitats. Harrison was excited to consider the regional, native and invasive variations in microbial life. This was a new arena for her and occurred just as the world pandemic broke, awareness of which imparted an additional urgency and poignancy to her project. At the studio in Eastport, she drew site-responsive microbial bodies informed by what the two scientists shared with her of their work.

Bay 7821, 2020, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

Harrison found that Pasadena, California, has its own world of residential microbes when she was invited to create a site-responsive outdoor installation for The Residency Project there. Harrison researched the local soil and plant microbes particular to the Southern California, LA region and the result, Bodies 8332: Pasadena, is composed of drawings of Achromobacter, Bacillus, Bradyrhizobium, Cupriavidus, Enterococcus, Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, and Streptomyces in varied sizes in a drawing digitally printed on aluminum and installed outside on location at The Residency Project.

Installation of Bodies 2332: Pasadena, 2021; photo courtesy The Residency Project

It’s an unusual installation in some ways as the close-grained sense of human mark is quite visible as elements within the glowing, light-toned rectangle, situated within plantings on the soil — of the plantings and yet an art object with an intimate scale where one does not expect it. A viewer gazes downward as though penetrating with the eye into the microbes of the soil. Harrison commented in an Instagram conversation in June of 2021, with curator, Sarah Umles, that she was “really looking forward to working with the dirt” when she makes a long-delayed visit to the Pasadena site.

We looked together at several of the videotapes that Harrison had made. Despite Harrison’s sense that she moves between mediums as entirely separate projects of exploration, it became apparent watching the videotapes in which bodies spun and reacted framed by media, that there is a continuum across all her projects.

Excerpt from Transmigration, 1986-1989. Music by Carol Parkinson; Text by Lynne Tillman, produced at the Experimental Television Center

The bodies of the microorganism images echo the bodies in her multimedia works, the organic shapes of her paintings and drawings and the convulsed bodies within Global Portraits. It seems that Harrison is attuned to some essential, fluidly dynamic core aspect of organic life that she perceives in all species and that she very much is contributing to our awareness of not just the forms but their qualities with her art. It may be ventured to say that she is among those artists working today across many mediums, who newly transmit awareness of our ecological co-habitations. Harrison also seems to be showing us that with human sensitivities guiding its use, that technology, instead of being an inhuman tool outside art making, is in her way of working a partner in the conveyance of the artist’s intuitions.

-Kimberly Lyons

October 2021

Bodies 6440, 2019, graphite and paper on paper, 18″ x 24″

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www.julie-harrison.com

All images copyright and courtesy of Julie Harrison

Art, Creativity, Drawing, Science