Route Motif represents a first for the artist Chloe Harris and another first for Basement. Chloe is a young artist at the very beginning of her career, educated at Exeter School of Art, and who has recently become a full member of the Society of Women Artists. Over the last three years she has exhibited as an Associate Member in their Annual Group Exhibitions. Her show at BasementArtsProject represents her first solo project as an artist.

For BasementArtsProject it also represents another first, this time a mural as public art. Recently we achieved a first in terms of creating a 6.75tonne stone sculpture in public and for the public. This first will be a mural of approximately 30ft in height, not 50 yards away from the Jacob’s Ladder sculpture.

Chloe’s first foray into the world of exhibiting as a solo artist, will set the scene for the other work that she will realise here in the community of South Leeds. 

Route Motif is an exhibition that gathers together a large amount of the artist’s work in one place as an example of her oeuvre, developed over a short period of time. The exhibition is frenetic, work displayed in the manner of its production - at speed. The thematically disparate nature of the four series’ that are on display are tied together by the artist’s distinctive style and the nature of it’s installation.

A network of climbing ropes not only connect the different bodies of work, her most recent focusing on climbing walls, but also allows you to traverse, in no particular order between sections on the cityscapes of Leeds and Exeter and the Leeds Amazon Warehouse. It was during the pandemic that I first met Chloe, after she contacted me about the work she was making whilst everyone was locked down and she was a key worker with Amazon. After a socially distant meeting we published a series of articles in the BasementArtsProject Online Lockdown Journal. I was surprised to find that when it came time to plan her Real-World exhibition at BasementArtsProject, that she no longer wanted to focus on the Amazon series. The more we talked the more apparent it became as to why. 

Chloe is extremely prolific and less than a year later she is not only living in a different city but has also produced a whole new set of prints, this time based on climbing walls, and also utilising perspex as a material on which to print. Although the method used for these new pieces sits somewhere between printing and painting.

The subject matter of the various series’ is actually not as disparate as it may first seem. The thread that runs through all of the work as strongly as the climbing ropes that run through the exhibition, is speed and movement. In this respect I think of Chloe’s work as being quite futurist in terms of approach; as with the futurist movement of the early twentieth century there is sweeping gestural quality indicating movement, intensity, speed, busyness and modernity. Yet there is something lonely about the work as well. Characters at rest or in motion always seem engaged in their own thoughts, oblivious to the pace of their surroundings. In this, there is an element of Edward Hopper’s prints; abstracted, sometimes almost beyond recognition, but the sense of isolation is there. The characters are always so deftly executed you can feel the fluidity of movement yet their mood can be felt deeply.

And it is in this style that we can get a picture of the artist herself. It is impossible not to be swept up by the rush of energy everytime Chloe enters a room. The energy and passion which she dedicates to her work is apparent in every aspect of her character. Someone who not only pushes at the boundaries of what is possible but picks you up and throws you over the boundary into new and uncharted waters. This is an exhibition that is on the move, even when settled into a venue for a duration, it feels like it could be packed down in an instant to be moved to its next destination.

This is actually what will be happening. This exhibition will be transferred for a second iteration, in a slightly different format to BLANK_ Gallery at Leeds City College as part of their Leeds2023 programme. We hope that during this second show we will have started, and maybe even finished the South Leeds mural.

Bruce Davies | May 2023