Dominic Harris

Dominic Harris conceives his work in a distinctly 21st-century medium, redefining the boundary between the biological and the digital. Harris approaches every new artwork with a keen curiosity. Drawing on his background in design, craftsmanship, architecture and the natural world, Harris begins by delving deep into his chosen subject matter, uncovering histories, patterns and other valuable perspectives that inform his creative process. Harris harnesses the latest technology to create digital ecosystems which mirror the patterns of the natural world and respond to human presence. His landscapes, creatures, and objects are often painstakingly digitally hand-painted, reflecting a reverence for natural phenomena steeped in art history, drawing inspiration from the Old Masters, Impressionism, and Pop art. Driven by his fascination with code, Harris builds interactive experiences which immerse the viewer in unique digital environments, illuminating the fragility and beauty of the natural world. Where directed generative technology is employed, Harris uses bespoke software infrastructure and manual refinement processes to imbue creatures and environments with the hand of the artist.

The butterfly is a recurring motif in Harris’ oeuvre, emphasising themes of metamorphosis and transformation. Harris collaborated with the Moveo Art Collection and Naturalis Biodiversity Center to create Origins of Imagination. The work fuses art, technology, and nature, inviting visitors of all ages to co-create a continuously evolving digital collection of butterflies. The artificial intelligence that transforms the butterfly drawings has been trained on specimens from the extensive butterfly collection at Naturalis. At its core, the artwork reflects the principles of biological evolution. The butterflies’ transformations symbolise the processes of change, adaptation, and growth that occur in nature. Each new butterfly added to the collection contributes to the artwork's ongoing transformation, ensuring it is never static, as with life itself.

Butterflies are not the only animals that appear in Harris’ work; a wide variety of species can be found throughout his body of work. For example, in Ruffled, Harris turns his attention to ornithology, producing digital portraits of 20 different birds which are given a striking degree of realism. This interactive work shows the birds in poses as though they are being painted for a portrait, with slight indications of life visible as the animals gently breathe or twitch while in position. In a similar way, Arctic Souls sees Harris examine the inherent beauty and vulnerability of the Arctic's most characteristic residents: the polar bear, the Arctic fox and the Arctic hare. The triptych highlights the animals' grace and nobility by showing them in the form of classical portraits. Each of the portraits captures the essence of the animals when they are young, stressing their complete purity and their capacity for growth in a constantly changing world. The fact that the animals are deliberately shown outside their natural habitat makes the triptych a moving reminder of the fragility of their ecosystems and the need to protect them.

Harris’s ability to bring animals to life digitally caught the attention of the Walt Disney Company, who invited Harris to work with their extensive back catalogue. With the resulting artworks Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mickey & Minnie: An Interactive Diptych (2018), Harris has become the only digital artist exhibiting in museums and galleries permitted to use Disney’s classic characters. In honour of Walt Disney’s brilliance, Harris treats the icons of pop culture, created almost a century ago, with the utmost fidelity by reinterpreting the original hand-drawn designs. Through interaction, the viewer together with the artist redefine the well-known narratives in unexpected ways.

Harris's artworks invite reflection on diverse subjects, not only by increasing awareness of the natural world, but also prompting critical questions about the roles of technology and media in contemporary society. Feeding Consciousness features a three-metre-high digital sculpture inspired by the Biblical Tower of Babel. Harris employs this motif as a framework to examine the functions of modern communication and technology, using it as a metaphor for the casual consumption of news and information. The tower continuously evolves by receiving real-time data and displaying images from globally trending stories. Similarly, in Sounds of Liberty, Harris explores perception, truth, and the evolving concept of liberty in an era saturated with data. In another work titled Limitless, the artist addresses stock market volatility and the ephemeral nature of wealth by investigating the intersections of technology, finance, and mythology.

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