Heart Florals

A 2024 finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Zaide Harker’s paintings pulse with urgency, shaped by lived experience and expressed through an unguarded, physical engagement with paint. 

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.

The works presented here centre on loosely held still-life arrangements: flowering stems, clustered blooms, and weighty vessels that appear to buckle slightly under the pressure of their own making. Sunflower heads, protea-like forms, and curling pink and white blooms are constructed from dense slabs of oil, their surfaces ridged and striated with gesture. Colour is laid on generously — yellows, greens, creams, and bruised pinks folding into one another — creating fleshy, tactile surfaces that hold the record of the artist’s hand. 

Studio Imagery: Liv Bridge