Harrison is an artist attracted to the day-to-day oddities that are often overlooked by most people. His paintings are populated by fantastical characters and wildlife placed in eerie, otherworldly settings. Taking traditional subjects of landscape and myth the artist creates magical tales that are relevant to our time and make strange our relationship to the natural world. Fairy tales have been an important influence in Harrison's work from Alice in Wonderland, The Master and Margarita and Gogol's short stories to British writers such as Cowper Powys, Mervyn Peake and Henry Williamson. In all these stories, as in Harrison's paintings, the natural and supernatural go hand in hand.Harrison's works are created on surfaces ranging from rough wooden panels to larger canvases and vary from intimate, naturalistic studies to elaborate compositions. They are unified by Harrison's approach, which combines the fantastical with the real, the magical with the everyday. His paintings often tell of man's impact on nature and of nature settling scores in elaborate twists of fortune. Surrounded by the dirt, detritus and blighted urban decay of humanity, his creatures inspire a sense of wonder and remain powerful witnesses to man's vanity and foolishness.



Harrison takes us to a parallel world in which familiar objects are made strange by their skewed perspective and the paranormal narrative which has brought them together. Under a Samuel Palmer moon, perfectly framed within a star-drenched sky, a naked old-man, clearly identifiable as the 'Dangly' in the work's title, sits quietly watching a river go by. Across from him stands a ginormous, Kafka-esque fly, dominating the foreground and lending a sense of foreboding to the otherwise tranquil composition. "In fairy stories," Harrison observes, the natural and supernatural go hand in hand." Beyond the lopsided strange house on the lake, we are encouraged to believe, is yet another world, a world of dreams and the dark side of the moon.The natural world, and the struggle of all living creatures to thrive and secure their existence within it, is a central theme in Harrison's work. Birds, plants, animals and humans, both real and imaginary, spiritual, pagan and symbolic, take their places in his compositions, engaging the viewer and encouraging us to look beyond what we know to be existent. This is again the case in Spirits Drifting, in which night-dwellers awaken a cast of nocturnal creatures, led by a swooping, screeching bird of prey. Painted with a puzzling precision, not unlike Surrealist dreamscapes of the early 20th-century, even familiar devices and objects begin to appear strange and out of place.