Cultivating creativity with Rachel Harbour

By Fiona Campbell

When I first took an art workshop with Rachel Harbour, I was struck, perhaps enchanted, with her delight around creating and teaching. She inspires joy over the making of things and cultivates a space for her student to just play.

Despite being the child of two scientists, her mum a botanist, her dad a nuclear medicine physicist, there was always an appreciation for the arts: “I always painted, did watercolours and doodles… I don’t remember not having arts supplies,” she says. Then in high school she discovered the BFA program at York University and art became something she could “study and do.” Then she learned of the concurrent education program at York, and art became something she could study, do and teach. Her background was in painting, but she decided to study sculpture and printmaking. “Most people don’t start a degree in something they don’t know… it’s a little weird,” she says. This experience fostered her curiosity about different art forms and gave her a place to just “try stuff.”

“I always really loved to make things but never felt stuck in a particular box,” says Harbour. “The flattering way to refer to that is ‘versatility.’ The less flattering might be ‘indecisive,’” she says with a laugh. There is a lot of laughter when speaking with Harbour. “When I feel the need to really delve in and express something, I always go back to painting, but when I just feel like playing, that’s when it becomes anything.”

Before the pandemic, Harbour offered workshops at the Belleville Public Library and from her home studio in Wooler, Ont., and her projects (like her own portfolio) range from creating with acrylic, watercolour, wire and beads, to tile with alcohol ink, painted rocks and acrylic pouring. I tell her I admire her ability to play, try different tools and techniques, to not have an attachment to a certain result. To create for the sake of creating. She admits it took her took her a long time to get there.

When her two boys (now adults) were small, she says there was an intensity to her work: “Time was so precious… maybe I had an hour, and there was this pressure that whatever I was doing it had to matter, it had to lead to something, it had to be legitimized. With a lot of work, there was a forcedness to it.”

But at the same time she had a space in the kitchen called the Creative Cupboard, full of markers, stickers, crayons and glitter, and while school taught the kids structured creating, Harbour says, “art time with mum was bananas!”

“These little people were giving me this massive creative exploratory opportunities, where it was abundantly clear that the end result was completely irrelevant. It was all about just making something.” During this time period polarized by a focus on finishing something “serious” and this joyful creative time with the kids, she eventually said, “there’s got to be a way for this to come together.” Now in her 50s her home studio is full of boxes of materials to play with.

“When I’m stuck in a painting and it’s not behaving, I’ll get out some fabric, glue some beads on, play with some wire; it might become recognizable like an ornament, or it might become an attachment to a collage or a multimedia painting, or it just might be a pretty thing that I play with for the day,” says Harbour. “Even if it hasn’t led to any work that will become a piece, it has enabled the struggle to loosen up. It can be resolved because I’ve reminded myself it’s supposed to be fun. Even if it’s dealing with something that causes angst or sadness or anger, it’s still supposed to be fun on the way to way to figuring that out.”

Harbour’s last workshop was in March 2020, and since then she has kept her students connected and creative with projects that she shares by email. She’s deeply aware how many people are struggling with the loss of normalcy and community. She also feels the weight of how little her life has changed and how the pandemic actually presented her with opportunity: last August Wendy RaysonKerr, acting curator of the Parrott Gallery, told her there was an open time in January for a show. There was something, a whisper, a poke from the universe saying “take this leap” to which Harbour replied: “A solo show in five months? I could probably pull that off.”

Her Garden Sanctuary show (February 20 to March 25) featured a collection of 20 paintings in watercolour and acrylic; a close and careful, even impeccable, observation of objects found in her garden across the seasons. She says it would normally take her 12 to 18 months to produce this amount and quality of work because of her busy workshop schedule, but because she wasn’t teaching, that means she could be painting.

“This horrible thing is happening to the whole entire world, and for me, it’s presented a blessing… How do I reconcile the terrible stuff I see on the news and this gift [of a show] that I have? It’s not fair. I haven’t really processed that, and I don’t know if it’s something that can be processed; processing implies there could be steps to reconcile that inequality.”

I ask whether how people experience her art, how these close studies of nature that suspend time and create space for the viewer, could be a part of her ‘reckoning’: “The thing that I would love for people to take, especially of this show, is what I’m always going on about: being good at drawing is being good at looking… and that’s what all these pieces are all about: really slowing down and looking.”

She adds: “If me painting the details that I’ve slowed down to see can cause a viewer to slow down and see back, well, that would be cool.”

And while she’s grateful for the time offered by a blank teaching slate, she’s looking forward to being connected with her student community again: “I really really miss it.”

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