Darren Harvey-Regan Interview

Well known for works such as The Erratics, Metalepsis, Materialising, Grounds of Doubt, and The Halt, Darren Harvey-Regan has become synonymous with a unique kind of expanded photography. By co-opting the medium, he conflates photography, sculpture, and language, into an integrated viewing experience. As a result, he has refined a practice that witnesses a sustained interrogation of the boundaries between representation and material, blurring image, form, frame, and object. However, in his latest project Eikõn & Klan, he has begun to embed the personal too. Stemming from his Christian upbringing and subsequent loss of faith, as well as including ideas of iconoclasm, Eikõn & Klan puts Harvey-Regan’s lived experience centre stage, whilst also being a predominantly sculpture based project. In this interview we discuss this latest body of work as well as his most recent exhibition, No Body Besides, held at Serchia Gallery, in collaboration with photographic and performance-based artist, Tom Lovelace. 

​​Darren Harvey-Regan: I’ve known Tom for many years now and there’s been a lot of overlap in our exploration of the expanded photograph and of what constitutes an ‘image.’ When Christine mentioned artists, she was looking to share dates with for her upcoming programme and Tom’s name came up, that seemed like an ideal combination.

DH-R: I was looking for something that distilled a sense of religious and historical imagery. The sculptures here originally grew from photography, from balancing crumbling concrete-soaked material in ways that echoed religious sculptures. The sculptures have been the next logical step proceeding the images, an attempt to fix in material what was previously only fixed in an image (the balancing material being too unstable to move).

The material goes through various stages of setting and reconfiguring to achieve its final form, a process of breaking and building that echoes the nature of destruction and preservation throughout this work. Using alabaster as covering and sanding until fluid the pieces are finally waxed, traces of their different materials/processes left visible.

The forms aim to echo something of the figurative and gestural most commonly associated with religion and classicism but in arrangements that could be breaking down or rising up. They are ambiguous fragments of an inherited past, conforming not any specific moment but recalling tropes of many, something like the persistence of a formal ideal or an archetype of recurring forms.

Alena Alexandrova in her book Breaking Resemblance captured this perfectly for me: ‘When religious motifs are borrowed and placed in a secular context, they cease to signify religious ideas and instead acquire new meaning. They signify something borrowed; instead of being a visual translation of a religious narrative, they represent other images or ‘represent representation’.’

DH-R: It’s the first time I’ve exhibited only sculptural work that isn’t read through accompanying imagery (although in this case we have Tom’s work to offer that particular lens, so to speak)

As an overall body of work E&K is the convergence of several trajectories, including things I haven’t typically foregrounded or spoken about before. It’s confusing if I’m honest, since I don’t know how to contextualise it all and how much to interpret what I’m doing through the lens of what I’ve done. I’ve previously worked more openly with the formal concerns of the photographic medium although I think the further away I’ve gotten from academia the harder that has been to sustain and the more I have wanted to prioritise both the processes of making and a narrative more connected to me, more grounded in my own life than in abstract concepts of critical thinking.

My relationship to photography has always been, as you say, iconoclastic and this whole body of work has been asking questions about how to value things abandoned or rejected, so it’s fitting that I ask that of my relationship to the medium itself.

DH-R: I think Photography in art has a tendency towards either conceptual interpretations or to self-negation as a direct window to the world (in the sense that we’re invited to consider the people, places and things depicted more than the process of that depiction). The former appeals to the mind, the latter perhaps more to the emotional resonance of the heart or experience. Neither immediately suggest physicality to me, in the sense that looking at a print in a gallery I’m rarely struck by the physical touch of the maker on the object of the image itself (which is where Tom’s work is so interesting in his foregrounding the body in the image, or the image as somehow physically fluid).

Photography rejects or absorbs any analogy and I guess in most images the view of the lens connotes the presence of a body, a gesture of its making?

My own use of photography has often veered into the conceptual which has a tendency to relegate it to the mind, but in exhibitions I’ve tethered it to sculptures and objects. A means of grounding photography in the present moment interests me, connecting it to movements or objects in the room. So in this respect it’s interesting to see performances that again bring the photograph into the present moment, align them with gestures in the room, be they part of Tom’s performances or those frozen in the sculptural forms.

DH-R: The sculptures are extended by the performance, the gestures of the bodies beside them seemed to enhance those suspended in the material. I’ve always seen these pieces as fixed in a moment of fluidity, perhaps rising, perhaps falling, and as the performers echoed something of that alongside them it seemed to me to sync into the gestures the materials contain. It relates back to this idea of works being tethered to the present moment, connecting to something there in the exhibition space. 

DH-R: That work certainly adapted to viewers proximity and perspective, at a distance it appeared like drapes behind glass but closer up the stone-like texture of the concreted material and the impossible angles of the folds became apparent. 

I think my work often rewards a close looking, containing deceptive appearances, materials not being what their forms suggest, where properties that seem to belong to the image – montage, double exposure, digital effect – belong instead to the object recorded, etc. I’m intrigued by how forms, materials or appearances are translated across different mediums, by what remains fixed and what alters in that process. 

I wonder whether there is a direct correlation between these ideas and my experience of growing up in a religious belief. Faith is, after all, a belief that the world is other than it appears, and as a medium of appearances photography is well suited to explore that.

DH-R: I hope that opportunity will arise. There’s a lot of scale, material, and perspective shifts within this body of work that would take a wider exhibition to be fully appreciated.