Dominic Harris: Life as Art as Interaction

Digital artist Dominic Harris creates beautiful work that captures the viewer’s attention with precise detail and vibrant colour, but it is only as we move closer that they come to life.

[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]M[/dropcap]orphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits… each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.’ – Rupert Sheldrake

Glistening butterflies, iridescent and perfect, air their wings and react to invisible forces, in natural scenes combed and cultured, progressing to the graceful arch of time. Digital artist Dominic Harris creates beautiful work that captures the viewer’s attention with precise detail and vibrant colour, but it is only as we move closer that they come to life. Clouds of butterflies surge across the gallery, celestial bodies wheel across desert landscapes, as shadows spear across dunes and life reacts to the light.

Surrealism is sometimes seen as an exploration of psychological concepts expressed through a cinematic or hyperreal distance. That appears to be something reflected in your work.

It really is. Can you imagine what Salvador Dalí would be creating today with the variety of mediums that are available to us? For instance, I watched this documentary on the National Geographic channel that featured a time lapse of sand dunes moving. They generally move painfully slowly, but in my world (Deserted: White Sands, 2016) you can see them move, rippling like an ocean. [By interacting with the work] we can also leave our mark here, which again, will disappear with time. We can also bring in daylight and I think it’s important to recognise that this is a study of warmth, of colours. Also that we recognise the fact that my medium is digital. We’re dealing with photons, beams of light.

If you go back to the Renaissance painters, when people really started working with perspective, they introduced the visual phenomena associated with that. For instance, as things recess in depth you notice the absence of reds, so things become blue. These are all things I bring to my artwork, though I will happily admit that I am no historian. My accuracy is fairly minimal and in the end I’m telling a story; my works are depictions…