T O R H A R R I S O N

Tor Harrison is a British multidisciplinary artist specialising in hand-built ceramics and photography. With a sculptor’s eye for shape and detail, Tor creates captivating imagery across the genres of portraiture, art, fashion, beauty, landscape, and architecture. Brimming with warmth, her photographs possess a tonal subtlety that feels minimalist yet generous. From rippling bodies of water to handcrafted objects and spaces, bathed in the gentle undulations of natural light, her timeless images express a reverence for earthy, material forms of beauty.

While working in both digital and analogue formats, Tor finds particular value in the slow, transformative process of developing film. Forgoing the precision afforded by modern digital technologies helps lend a soft, impressionistic quality to much of her work. Space itself is given an ever so subtle form—emerging through the granularity of film as a barely perceptible yet omnipresent haze. Tor’s subjects, human and otherwise, arise within this diffuse medium, appearing in close connection with their environment. Bodies are floated in air and light. Objects sunk in shade and absence. Through such a dynamic and allusive lens, Tor captures something of the way we see and move through the world: on peripheries; in motion; enmeshed in spatial webs of feeling, mood, memory.

As a visual artist living and working in Cornwall, Tor also creates a limited number of ceramic vessels a year from her riverside studio. She specialises in hand-building: gently sculpting the clay by hand using ancient traditional techniques, such as pinching and coiling. As Tor says, “It is a slow, repetitive, and inherently meditative process.” The shape of each vessel emerges gradually and intuitively, embodying a fluid relation between material and maker. Organic, bellied forms with dimpled surfaces retain the raw character of clay, while appearing to wear as ornament the natural rhythms and impressions of Tor’s fingertips. As she writes, “Glaze pools in still visible marks, inviting touch. Light reflects off the surface, highlighting the imperfection of the handmade.”

Such slowly and attentively crafted objects communicate a deep regard for the art of making itself. They express a reverence for materiality— for the cunning of a human hand and for clay as literal body of earth. Through her hand-building, Tor shapes matter in a way that preserves its wildness. Elemental and mysterious, her vessels bear no small resemblance to the rugged Cornish landscape she calls home. Certainly, they eschew an overly refined or purely functional aesthetic. As Tor enthuses:

“I want a warmth and a sense of humanity in my objects. I literally couldn’t create anything perfect. It’s my fingers and it’s clay: such an incredibly primal and ancient material that really has a life-force of its own.”

— TOR HARRISON

It is this felt connection to something larger—a sense of having communed with wild, unruly forces—that underlies the artist’s fascination with both mediums: pottery and film. As Tor reflects, “I'll make a piece and then it has to go into a kiln and be fired at over a couple of thousand degrees. There’s a transformation that happens there. Similarly, with the processing of film: there’s an alchemy that happens that I can’t control. It feels as though I’ve collaborated with something else.”

A sense of the untamed permeates Tor’s work in both fields. Her embrace of slow, traditional methodologies leaves her work perpetually open to vital natural forces, to change and disruption. In this way, her art practice models a more vulnerable, relational, and ultimately, more reverential way of engaging with the larger world around us.

—

ceramic vessels by Tor Harrison

photography by Tor Harrison

essay by Jo Ward