Recycled Portraits

In 2019 Laura de Harde completed her PhD in the discipline of History of Art, at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). This event marked the culmination of five years of cross-continental research in archives and museums in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Germany. These years of archival sleuthing prompted her to interrogate the relationship we have with objects; what we preserve and why we do so. From this work she has developed a powerful conceptual framework that underpins her approach to her artistic practice as well as her academic research. 

De Harde draws inspiration for her paintings, from the many years she spent researching and working in the storerooms of museums and galleries in South Africa, Germany and Zimbabwe. In these spaces, De Harde discovered archives of historical photographic portraits some of which were taken towards the beginning of the previous century. In some instances, these portraits have been separated from the documentation collected about the original sitters, leaving a plethora of unknown faces in the cupboards, shelves, drawers, boxes and files of some museums. For De Harde, there is an interesting dichotomy that exists in museum spaces: the presence of the objects/photographs in the archives gives the impression that they are protected, yet they are paradoxically vulnerable to neglect, as the interest of the museum, and indeed the public, inevitably changes over time. Her use of ink (and sometimes bleach) echoes this uncertainty in the present: the bleach causes the ink to change colour years after the work is ‘finished’. Moreover, De Harde’s artworks, much like the archival photographs she uses for inspiration, continue to have lives of their own that extend beyond their inception in the studio space. The Recycled Portrait Project has become about De Harde’s attempts to try and capture the portraits of the unknown sitters through the use of an unpredictable medium that has the capacity to erode and disintegrate. In this way, she uses ink and bleach to explore themes of permanence and ephemerality in the creation of her artworks. This project is about archives and our innate desire, as humans, to preserve and conserve our past.