This year we were honoured and delighted to award the HIGH Prize for Creative Excellence to Makiko Harris a multimedia visual artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, and sound.
In exploring hybridity, ambiguous identity, femininity and the constructed self, Makiko investigates themes that are entirely in accordance with HIGH’s creative mission.
The finished works are remarkable for their diversity, while remaining entirely consistent in their line of inquiry and the quality of their execution. The results speak for themselves.
We chat with Makiko to know more about her art, her background and her experience at the Royal College of Art.
In your work you discuss the performative aspect of femininity. What, if any, aspects of your own self-presentation might you describe as performative?
My work has often been about the feminized body and how it relates to narratives around cultural stereotypes, power, and agency.
Both personally and in my research practice I am curious about how altering my self-presentation changes the dynamics of how I engage with and move around the world, including how I engage with my own work.
Right now, I’m experimenting with a hyper-feminized archetype, at the nexus of anthropological experimentation and what feels most like myself. It might change, I'm not precious about it. Ru Paul says “we’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” I agree, I think we’re all performing ourselves all the time, none of us can escape it. Ignoring self-presentation is still a choice. I think because of the visibility of being both a woman and multicultural, the privilege of blending in never existed for me anyway. I don’t think being intentionally performative is a falsehood, in fact, I think owning your story instead of having it assigned to you can be liberating.
Your work and background is truly multicultural. Out of the places you've lived, worked and regard as part of your heritage, is there one place you would say is ‘home’?
I have moments of a sense of home in many places - the dappled light amongst the redwoods in northern California, the sound of clinking beers and laughter amongst piles of food with family in suburban Japan, sitting quietly overlooking the garden from my flat in London. But there is no one place I would call home. I think it’s part of why I take refuge in artmaking, both to try to communicate the forever-outsider experience, and also to seek a sense of home in the global community and lineage of artists that existed before I started practicing and will exist after me too.
I never attended art university full time before the Royal College of Art. I earned a minor in art during my Philosophy B.A. at Tufts University in Boston and took night classes in painting at the California College of Art on and off for many years. When I started at the RCA, it wasn’t easy transitioning to a new country and culture, returning to being a full-time student 10 years after my B.A., and seriously interrogating my practice for the first time all at once.
However, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to pursue my MA and cannot speak highly enough of the tutors and technicians I was lucky enough to work with. One specific thing that was a shock: it never occurred to me before I enrolled that I would not have 24 hour access to my studio! I was used to US schools, where studios are always accessible. I had to be very judicious with my time given the restrictions to access I encountered, but it also forced me to take breaks. I think I would have slept in my studio otherwise.
In the art world today - as indeed, everywhere - self-presentation, self-promotion and communication through social media seem paramount. How do you approach this? Are there ways of enjoying it?
I think there are ways of seeing the promotion of the work as an extension of one’s practice. Everything can be art. Maybe the way you frame an image or the words in a caption are part of the work or concept. I want my work to mean something to someone beyond myself. To do that, people have to know it exists. Artists are creative problem solvers, and I think many of us can apply that skill towards marketing ourselves. It can be kind of fun; it doesn’t have to be that serious.
How does living and working as a feminist inform your own navigation of the art world?
The majority of my MA classmates were women. The majority of artists selling in auction houses, showing in top galleries, and having museum shows in most cases are still men. The issue is larger than the art world. I have a lot of fire about it, and I try to channel that energy productively. I make artwork from a feminist lens and am intentional about who I work with.
I am starting to produce curatorial projects, the first being a group exhibition in March 2024 in the Bay Area, California. My co-curator and I have selected a spectacular roster of women working in abstraction, highlighting women of color and queer women. The work in the show is so so good, I can’t wait to share it. I also can’t wait for my generation of women to be the matriarchs of the art world. Get ready.
You are such a multidisciplinary artist, is there any other, and for you, totally new technique, process or form that you’d be keen to try?
I’ve dabbled in glassblowing and neon bending and would like to further develop these skills to expand my sculpture practice. I’m planning to take up voice lessons as I continue to incorporate sound and audio tracks in my installations. Someday, I’d like to do some weaving, too.
On 14 July, the Royal College of Art’s renowned graduate show opened to the public. HIGH's Ian Garlant and creative partner Gemma Blackshaw, Professor of Art History at the RCA, viewed work by second-year Masters students from the School of Arts & Humanities exhibiting at the Truman Brewery in London’s East End, to draw up a shortlist for HIGH’s annual prize for outstanding achievement.
The shortlisted artist who caught Ian and Gemma’s attention were:
- Painting Carolina Aguirre
- Print Evegenia Slyusarenko
- Sculpture Helen Clarke
- Ceramics & Glass Pamela Jane Mcnicol Pudan
- Jewellery & Metal Bingrui Zhuang
- Photography Margaret Liang
Read more: https://www.high-everydaycouture.com/eu_en/high-prize-2023-winner-makiko-harris