Tom Harper is a London based artist. The artist systematically record places and spaces with an emotional connection, for example drawn to relics of the past, preserving traces of historic presence to better understand our relationship with, and the artist's own often elusive feelings about, the world. Harper's drawing and printmaking interventions, often specific to place, seek to capture sensory experience. The artist aims to unearth the unique beauty of lived experience that we often take for granted.

An embodied haptic engagement is key to Harper's practice, by which is meant a tactile enjoyment of making rooted in perpetual wonder of surface and materiality. Through printmaking, graphite rubbings and plaster casts of inked surfaces, the artist commemorates the imbedded histories and uniqueness of artifacts that can so often inform our lives.

Harper uses Scritta Paper for the drawn rubbings, used most famously for making Bibles, to further emphasise the act of recording and preserving; its fragility evocative of precious forgotten histories. The casts of inked surfaces magnify void spaces, by which is meant the subtle traces of wear and tear of surfaces and allow the viewer to appreciate their unexpected subtleties.

Harper is interested in questioning how the viewer perceives the world, asking what is meaningful in our day-to-day lives and what things connect us. 

"Through the expanded field of drawing and printmaking, I wish to push the boundaries of what we know and think we recognise about the world."

- Tom Harper