“Best Laid Plans” and beyond: Whit Harris shows the contradictions of creation

Whit Harris’s art stands out for how it transforms personal narratives into universal reflections. Her recent solo exhibition, “Best Laid Plans,” held at Peninsula Gallery in Chinatown, New York, looked at the unpredictability of artistic creation and the tension between intention and outcome. Using imagery inspired by her own life—red shoes, braids, rainbows—Harris shows how objects and gestures can take on layered, sometimes contradictory meanings. This week, she’ll show Nephthys’ Vase at NADA Miami, bringing her practice into tactile, three-dimensional forms.

Lydia Nobles spoke with Whit about the symbolism behind “Best Laid Plans,” how her upbringing shaped the works, and the challenges of translating memory into art.

Lydia Nobles: Tell us about the title of your exhibition, “Best Laid Plans.”

Whit Harris: The exhibition title is a famous saying that comes from this poem by Robert Burns about a mouse who builds a house that gets washed away in the rain. When making work for this show, I thought a lot about the contradictory nature of planning a painting versus the process of making one, how an artist can plan and anticipate one thing but the results become something entirely different—like the image but also the ideas behind it gets interpreted in a wildly different way than intended. I’m interested in that gulf between artistic intention and results—an idea and its concretization—and how marks can translate and influence an image and its potential for meaning.

Lydia Nobles: Rainbows and other iconography like a knife, cigarette, or high heel interlude throughout the works. What do they signify for you?

Whit Harris: I was interested in depicting things that had personal significance in my life and its potentiality for symbolic interpretation by an audience. In the painting “When the Grass Touch You,” there’s the red shoe that was a favorite of my mother’s, who I think associated them with elegance and owned lots of shoes in different shades of red that she rarely wore. They were kept in a pile on the floor of a closet located in the hallway that I walked by everyday and just left this impact on me.

She also had a knife that she kept by her bedside that was just kind of part of the backdrop in the home I grew up in. It felt benign to me and I think about how gaining awareness with age and exposure changed the significance of it for me now. I remember being fascinated by knives and shoes in the same way I was fascinated by rainbows and clouds and I just think it’s funny and strange that these things kind of lived in the same world of mystery for me now.

Lydia Nobles: The braided elements in “No Face No Case” surrounding the central figure add a layer of cultural resonance, alluding to ritualistic or ancestral ties, reminiscent of the surrealist obsession with the unconscious and the symbolic. We are reminded again of gestures like the ones by Sha’Carri Richardson that are highly documented as she crosses the finish line. Is there personal iconography from your life that allude to a similar posturing or gesture?

Whit Harris: I mean, my mother braided my hair and I think about how I miss that sometimes even though it was a fraught event because I fought her so much when she did. Perhaps some of the gestures and tangling in the mark-making mirrors that sense of longing and emotional tension around that, this grief I feel on a personal level but also the complicated feelings of anger and  fear because it would hurt to have my hair braided. She’d be pulling and twisting to get it “laid” and I internalized this idea that pain is a normal part of caretaking and a healthy expression of maternal love. 

I think on some level these paintings are me processing this contradictory idea borne out in intimate moments in my childhood with people who love me, and questioning my belief around being cared for, and the actual pain I experienced from this seemingly benign and loving act.

Lydia Nobles: Air (smoke) and water are present in your works. What is your connection to these elements and why do you feel drawn to painting them? 

Whit Harris: They’re really fun to paint and I feel able to let go of overthinking forms while making them. They’re these shapeless forms that remain open to interpretation and in some ways relate to geomancy and this process of divining meaning by observing spontaneous compositions in the natural world. In one of the paintings the clouds form the word “fuck” in a loose script and I thought it would be obviously visible to most viewers, but I’m surprised by how many people not only miss it but dont even look for words or images in cloud. 

Lydia Nobles: In our various conversations, you’ve shared that drawing is the initial preclude to your paintings. Could you elaborate more on this process and how you ultimately decide which drawings transfer to paintings? Is it a 1–1 ratio or do the paintings become an amalgamation of multiple drawings?

Whit Harris: I choose drawings that become paintings mainly for their composition. I’lll often use a projector to see if it would work enlarged, and then try to match it with a pre-stretched canvas if I can. Of course the paintings change but how that happens relies mostly on my intuition. Rarely do I compile images from multiple drawings because I see the drawings as compilations of multiple ideas. 

Lydia Nobles: Your piece, “They Been At It for a Minute,” is currently on view at Mrs. Gallery. I love the posturing in this work. What types of feelings move through you when you’re choosing the posturing for your pieces?

Whit Harris: That work was part of a series of small clay figures based on the poses in a Matisse painting “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” so they’re directly referencing someone else’s idea. I think I felt pretty joyful making them! 

Lydia Nobles: Do you feel that certain posturing you depict relates to how you move and interact with your work in the studio? 

Whit Harris: My hand is always in the work so yes, the figures often reflect my own movements. Often I will mirror a pose with my own body to get a sense of what feelings I’m trying to convey, and adapt myself to the intention, or the work to myself, to decide what might look best to the viewer.

Lydia Nobles: You’re showing works at NADA Miami with Dimin Gallery. What types of work are you preparing and what’s different about those pieces?

Whit Harris: For NADA, I made a ceramic vase that’s a bust with wavy eyes and the head is split open at the top. The piece is titled “Nephthys’ Vase” and began with the intention of making a head that looked like it was swirling in violence and was just feeling dazed and out of it. The forms are really wavy and wobbly with these sharpish points at the top and everything appears to wiggle. I thought it’d be a fun challenge to handbuild a vase and make it look like one of my drawings and I believe I did.

Featured image: Whit Harris, At the Mouth of Reality, 2024, Oil on canvas, 21h × 17w inches.