Taylor Galleries is pleased to present Niks, a solo exhibition of new paintings by gallery artist Pat Harris.

The title of this exhibition Niks, is a Flemish word for 'Nothing' or 'Nothingness'. Oscar Wilde said that all art is useless, and faced with what is now happening on our planet, I feel this more and more. However, I do believe that art is an essential part of the human experience. Art can, and often does, concern itself with our longings, with our dreams, and with our will to create, often from nothing. In these recent paintings, with flower and landscape motifs, I have explored the space, the silvery light and the silence of North Mayo. It is a landscape of much suggestion and is never limited to the particular. In his introduction to Nan Shepherd's book The living mountain Robert MacFarlane writes: "it is in the particular that we see the universal". Through the sea stacks, the bogs and coastline of North Mayo I have seen a space and a light and it is this that I have tried to make visible and tangible in these paintings. While the motifs are of seascapes and flowers they are all an attempt to make the 'space between' tangible in marks and paint on canvas. They are paintings of many things and of a kind of nothingness.

In this exhibition, Harris brings together two complementary bodies of work: a series of oil paintings inspired by the coastline of North Mayo, and a group of large-scale paintings featuring a single flower motif. While these flower paintings mark a new direction in the artist's practice, they remain deeply connected to his experience of the Mayo landscape.

Harris's fascination with the light, space, and profound sense of nothingness that he encounters on long walks through the boglands of North Mayo informs both strands of this exhibition. The flower and landscape motifs stand side by side as testaments to the silvery light and quiet expansiveness of this western terrain. Through these works, Harris renders space, light, and silence as tangible, physical presences in paint.

As with all of his work, Niks reaffirms Harris's profound love of painting and his belief in its capacity to make the invisible visible - to transform sensation, perception, and memory into rich surfaces of pigment and form.