Exploring the life and spirituality that fuels a local artist
Harriet Forman Barrett’s art is both spiritual and political. Working in various mediums, including jewelry, wax-based sculptures, and paintings and oil pastels, Barrett says she is driven by her joy of life and her experiences as a woman. Based in New Paltz, N.Y, Barrett, who prefers to go by her first name, Harriet, currently has work on display at the Wired Gallery in High Falls, NY. She recently sat down for an interview with The Little Rebellion’s Matt Garton to discuss getting inspired by a trip to the Met as a child, supporting herself by making jewelry, and what she thinks her art means.
The Little Rebellion: Do you have a memory or instance where you saw a piece of art that really stood out to you as a young person? Or when you first started creating art?
Harriet Forman Barrett: My parents would occasionally take us to the Metropolitan Museum, and I would stand there and just look at certain artists. The way they painted eyes totally fascinated me. I didn’t realize then that was the seed of the soul. In third grade, during one day at camp, we were painting and everyone made a big thing of my landscape. I thought, “Oh, well this is interesting.” It was just a natural thing for me. It just flowed. I was one of the lucky ones to stumble on what I’d be in life. For me, it was just, “That’s my niche and that’s where I belong.”
TLR: How did you become a jewelry artist?
HFB: In college, there was a mandatory jewelry course that I really didn’t want to take and voilà, 55 years later, that’s what supported my whole life. I had to fight for it. At that time, in the ‘60s, everyone was into Danish jewelry that was very smooth and plain. Here I came in, with the figure and all the curves and the movement and the flow. I had stores that would say to me, “I love your work. I buy them for myself, but I don’t know about how my clientele will handle it.” I’d say, “If you feel it, you don’t think your clientele would feel it?” I had to work through that to build a big network of selling my work through all 50 states for a long time.
TLR: What is the message of your work?
HFB: Let’s look at one of my paintings. You tell me, what do you see?
TLR [pointing to “Generations of the Masks we Wear”]: Almost an unknowing, kind of like a mystery. The whole painting is mostly of this figure, but there’s still so many questions.
HFB: Isn’t that what life is about? For me, a good piece of art is something you never get tired of. I like something that you go by and you keep looking at it, wondering. Or you keep looking at it to drink it in because it’s feeding you. Or sometimes when you have something in your house, you forget you have it because you’re busy and you’re used to it. Then, all of a sudden, you see it from another angle and go, “Oh?” That’s what I like about art.
TLR: Do you have that emotion or feeling in mind when you’re creating art?
HFB: Being a woman, [my art] comes from what my fabric is of what I’ve lived through. I find that I don’t even realize it, but I’m very political and that seeps into my work. Sometimes, betrayal or the anger as a woman comes through. I can’t define it when I’m doing it because I’m not sitting there articulating it. I’m in it. I’m working it. It’s emotion that I’m working through and trying to put on the canvas.
TLR: How does your art relate to current affairs?
HFB: It’s about women—what we’re going through now, what we’ve gone through. With the crocheting built into my work, bringing through all the time that women have been the creators of all that. But see what’s happening with “Pieces of Her,” what’s happening to us in society, what’s happening to us with the laws being stripped from our ability to exist. This one is a woman squeezing and pulling out of what she’s gone through. She’s tied into a whole Victorian tight-assed being and trying to squeeze herself free. It’s not just what represents women, but it’s all those who have the understanding of empathy and sympathy. We sorely need it this time.
