Zaide Harker

A 2024 finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Zaide Harker’s paintings pulse with urgency and reflect a lived experience shaped by personal and political dimensions of identity, disability, and transformation. The palette knife is their tool of choice, used to expel vast quantities of paint onto canvas in a visceral act of making. These heavily worked surfaces ripple with movement, offering viewers not just images but physical records of emotion and exertion.

A diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease and a lifelong engagement with the disability support community deeply inform Harker’s practice. Their paintings are shaped by both the embodied experience of neurodegeneration and the personal history of caring for affected family members. This layered perspective rejects fear-based narratives around disability and instead affirms complexity, power, and grace. Paint becomes movement, resistance, and memory. Its undulating texture reflects both the artist’s chorea-affected gestures and the emotional terrain of their lived reality. Every mark is imbued with defiance, vulnerability, and intent.