Harriet Owles (b. 1998) is a British painter based in Suffolk, United Kingdom. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA Painting) in 2024.

 

Owles has exhibited internationally, including group exhibitions at Thompson’s Gallery in London and Aldeburgh (2025), and at Images of Old Greenwich Gallery in Connecticut, USA. She has been shortlisted for the National Portrait Gallery Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award (2026) and the Saatchi Gallery London Art Collective Prize (2025).

 

In 2024 her work was featured in PLUS Magazine in an article titled ‘Co-Existence of Procession and Stillness’. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and internationally.

Artist Statement 
 

I came to painting through film, captivated by the emotional power an image can carry. But film is bound to narrative, and I wanted a space where the image could do the work without plot. Painting became that space for me. When I remove objects and setting, narrative pressure collapses into simple relationships, shape against shape, body against body.

 

I lock my figures into geometric structures to hold and amplify that charge. A shift in orientation, forward-facing, turned away, upside down, a head tilt, eye contact, or the distance between bodies, changes the tension of the whole composition. Geometry lets me contain the figure’s weight through order rather than gesture, keeping the body close to the picture plane and holding it in a quiet, sustained stillness.

 

The paintings are built from what I carry. Film, art history, and my personal archive feed colour, pattern, and atmosphere as material, not story. The figure becomes an assembled image, formed from people in my life and the visual fragments that cling to them, remembered fabrics, photographs, textures, and moods that return.

 

Space is built through material decisions, stain versus paint, matte versus gloss, absorbed passages versus built relief. In some areas paint is thinned and runs into glossy rivulets that catch light. In others it is packed into granular texture, giving the geometry a physical edge you can feel. The result is a constructed portrait rather than a straightforward likeness, where emotion is carried by structure and surface, not narrative.

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