Born in 2000 in Reading, UK, Hargreaves lives and works in London, UK.
Hargreaves paints snapshots of a history that hasn’t quite happened. She often looks to the past, patchworking together historical stories to build new ones that feel contemporarily relevant. She is typically attracted to events that are bizarre, seemingly unexplainable, and apparently unique, and she attempts to find ways to weave them into broader contextual tapestries. The fictionality of her painted world allows for speculation and indecision when reflecting on such happenings. The limitations of reality are lifted, and Hargreaves is omnipotently able to mix worlds from prehistory with those of the Industrial Age, or the medieval with the present. The ambiguity provided in painting offers opportunities for nuance; elements of her research material are often difficult to understand from a 21st-century perspective, so she hopes her paintings might bring life to these distant pasts and invite reconsideration without the need for conclusions.
Hargreaves’ paintings are highly stylized, referencing a type of painting practiced by British artists between the wars. While the trauma of World War I pushed many artists in other countries toward the avant-garde and the future, British makers—in quite British fashion—looked to resurrect life pre-war, as though nothing had changed. A style of hard-edged realism emerged, rendered in meticulous detail, as though the painters were obsessively attempting to control and systematize the world around them, uncomfortably applying this to pastoral scenes of everyday life. It feels appropriate to revisit this style now, a hundred years on, in another period of war and pandemic, as well as climate crisis, applying elements to her images as though trying to find some sense in the unexplainable subject matter.
Willow Art Space 