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Tim Marlow: Most interviews for catalogues take place before a show has been installed. We have the luxury of doing a conversation at the end of the exhibition, so I want to know what you have learned from the interaction of the public with Feeding Consciousness. 

Dominic Harris: With the show being in London, I’ve been able to drop in quite often and eavesdrop on conversations. The bit that’s been most satisfying for me has been to see the public response and engagement. Probably the most revealing is to witness how some of the ideas I’ve been testing – including the pieces which are a bit more experimental – begin to resonate with people. Some of the stories I’m telling are stories which are all about optimism and beauty, but there’s also definitely the underlying reminders of fragility and our ability to upset things in the world. We can have an impact. But beauty is often seen as sort of a superficial adjunct to the technological aspect of what’s going on. I sometimes think I need to take a bit more of a third-party or third-eye perspective on what I’m doing and how people talk about it and what I should say about it. But it is futile because actually I do it because I love going to the studio. I genuinely love the creative process and I love the response it gives people. And it’ll be really interesting to see how that feeds in and through different generations – like the schoolchildren we saw coming in.

TM: You mentioned beauty; it’s almost a contentious word now. Is that more and more a device in your work if not quite to entrap people, certainly to bring people in? Or do you think beauty in and of itself in the natural world is something that you actually feel quite passionately that we should be celebrating, exploring and not be afraid of?

DH: As an artist, I have a choice to make, and I choose to make things which are beautiful. I want to be surrounded by beauty. Even within my pieces that have some slightly darker undertones, they are still created with an absolute eye for beauty. When I’m looking at nature, especially with the butterflies and the flowers, the fact is that nature’s had millennia to perfect itself. What can I do? I don’t pretend to massively improve on that, but I want to extract the best from it and tell some stories. And maybe if I can introduce a little bit of reinvention and add a tiny bit of my own narrative, and do it all keeping within that realm of beauty, it makes me incredibly happy.

TM: How do you respond to the idea that one of the things that is keeping young people away from the natural world is the digital media screen? And yet you’re bringing them to the natural world through the screen.

DH: Yes, I think I’m using the screen for a very specific purpose. I use the screen because it allows me to create artworks that have that sense of time and, obviously very important to me, also a sense of interaction, so that I can have stories that develop over time and in response to our behaviour.

If you think of some of the greatest memorable moments of watching a David Attenborough documentary – and you think of that incredible, awe-inspiring scene of something happening — I’m trying to create artworks that have these moments wrapped into them, but they’re there for you to discover. The screen is actually more of a canvas for me. And that canvas is my window into these worlds I am fabricating in order to tell these stories.

TM: I don’t want to infantilise the works at all, but I think there is a childlike element of wonder in some of them. Do you in some ways feel some of the sensations you felt as a child when you encountered the wonders of the world because that may be part of people’s overwhelming emotional experience? I’m not accusing you of offering psychoanalysis through digital art, but there is an element of the subconscious at work here.

DH: There is, I think. If you take the World Stage artworks, you are presented with a large array of butterflies which are colourful. You can touch them, you can even interact with them and you can disrupt them. But actually we’re disrupting. If you step back, you realise it could be the American flag – and suddenly you’ve got this American flag that’s made out of the butterflies. And the story it’s telling you at that moment is almost a kind of childlike enjoyment of, ‘oh, I can make everything move!’ What you’re doing is something that is actually a commentary about what was going through the world a couple of years ago as we went through the pandemic, and is still relevant – what seems to be a perfectly stable icon of a country can be disrupted temporarily. In my world, the butterflies will always rebuild, and the flag will always rebuild over time. But there are deep messages and symbolism occurring below that in what can apparently at first seem like quite a carefree act of movement. And I quite like that duality of the different levels of interaction.

TM: Serious play, I think.

DH: Yes, serious play.

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