miles off the coast, called Chichijima. It was
here that he was first drawn to the flattened
toads and, later, the other animal carcasses that
took center stage in his early work, though he
did not begin his art career in earnest until he
returned to Britain.
interest in islands and borders. “I often think
about margins and boundaries around things,
preoccupied with this idea of where one thing
ends and another begins,” he said. “We might
draw a map of the shore of an island as a looping line at the mean high water mark, but the
closer you get to this arbitrary border, the more
“I walked along the same road every day and
complex the interweaving of land and sea bewould see run-over cane toads,” he said. “They
comes. The water seeps into the sand, making
were fascinating little corpses that would dry up the boundary diffuse rather than distinct.”
in the sun but then get wet again in the rain. If
you filmed them on time-lapse,
they’d seem to be breathing as
their hydrophilic skin dehydrated and rehydrated in turn
until they disintegrated.”
Upon returning to Britain,
he began a series of paintings
from the 100 or so photos he
took of the toads. Along with
paintings of mammals and
birds, these were exhibited in
2010 at the Art Workers’ Guild
in London at a solo show entitled “In the Midst of Life.”
Though the bloody entrails in
the paintings can be jarring,
there is an unexpected beauty
to the awkward contortions
of the flattened animals, and
Harrison’s colorful, vivid style
brings life to the corpses.
Though he hesitates to say
that his parents’ influence
shaped his work—they were
both medical illustrators, after
all—he admits that he realized a connection in the more
visceral aspects of his toad and
pigeon paintings. He began to
develop a more precise, illustrative style to apply to the
drawings of organs he made
during his stint as Artist in
Residence at Barts Pathology
Museum from 2012–2013 and
soon realized he was “drawing
intestinal loops that had no
end, like Möbius strips.”
His fascination with endless systems stemmed from his
44
Toad IX (2009). 30cm x 50cm. Oil on panel.
Image courtesy of the artist.
SciArt in America June 2015