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Glenn Harvey Art, Cabo de Palos (2026)

07/09/2026

This installation was made in Coventry in the mid-1990s. An orange-and-white hang glider back-up parachute was suspended from the ceiling, its canopy opened but denied the sky for which it had been designed. Around it stood a group of domestic pedestal fans. Their electrical cables crossed the floor while their blades directed air towards the fabric, producing an uncertain simulation of the atmospheric forces that might once have held such a canopy aloft.

Hanging centrally beneath the parachute was a deconstructed plastic model kit of a PBY-5A Catalina. The aircraft had not been assembled into its promised and recognisable form. Its separated components remained suspended among the parachute lines: an aeroplane held at the point between potential construction and dispersal. The Catalina itself seemed significant. Designed to move between air and water, it was represented here neither flying nor floating, but disassembled and precariously dependent upon a small collection of domestic machines.

In the photographs taken when the installation was complete, parts of the floor were covered with sheets of newsprint. Across them I drew a decentralised network of branching lines—something resembling a mycelial system, without a single origin, centre or governing route. This drawn network extended the cords descending from the parachute and met the electrical cables feeding the fans. Lines associated with lift, control, communication and power became difficult to distinguish from one another.

The newsprint brought another circulation into the work: the daily production and dispersal of information, already approaching obsolescence almost as soon as it appeared. Upon that temporary ground, the drawn network suggested growth, transmission or contamination. Above it hung the dismantled aircraft; above that, the parachute. Around them, the fans continued their modest mechanical labour, moving the same enclosed air around the room.

The installation assembled several incomplete promises of flight. The parachute could not descend, the Catalina could not be assembled, and the fans could generate turbulence without escape. Everything depended upon lines—drawn lines, suspension lines and electrical leads—yet none offered a clear route out. What remained was a provisional ecology of air, machinery and information: a flying apparatus grounded indoors, sustained by a collection of pedestal fans and the rather fragile conviction that sufficient movement might eventually amount to flight.

06/09/2026

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06/09/2026

The Boat as a Moving Studio

There is nothing particularly novel about an artist working from a boat. Charles-François Daubigny was doing it in the nineteenth century, travelling the rivers aboard Le Botin, an old ferry he had converted into a floating studio. Claude Monet subsequently borrowed the idea and acquired his own studio boat at Argenteuil in the early 1870s. He had a small wooden cabin built upon it and painted both from it and, on several occasions, the boat itself.

I doubt very much that the tradition ends there.

For more than ten years, Boschplaat, our 1919 Dutch harbour tender, was home, transport, observation post and, rather improbably, my studio. Unlike Monet, however, I didn’t acquire a boat in order to paint from it. The sequence happened the other way around. We acquired the boat, lived aboard her and travelled through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Drawing gradually became an increasingly important part of that life. The studio had to be found somewhere within it.

The wheelhouse became the obvious candidate.

It was hardly an atelier in the grand tradition. There was no north-facing window, no heroic easel and certainly no respectful separation between artistic production and domestic life. There was a table, somewhere to sit, plenty of glass and whatever materials could reasonably be accommodated without making navigation, eating or getting from one end of the boat to the other unnecessarily hazardous.

But it was a wonderful place from which to work.

The view was continually changing. Sometimes the subject was immediately outside the window. At other times it began with stepping across a quay or taking the dogs for a walk along the towpath. Instead of travelling to places in order to draw them, we were living among the things that eventually became drawings. A lock, a tree, an old barge, a grain silo or an apparently unremarkable stretch of canal bank might simply be part of the surroundings for several days before something about it began to insist upon attention.

Living aboard also imposed a physical discipline on the work. Space was limited, storage even more so, and most of my drawings consequently settled around A4 or sketchbook dimensions. There were exceptions, particularly during periods of land-based respite in Spain, when a little more space permitted the work to expand. But aboard Boschplaat, the dimensions of the table and the practicalities of boat life quietly established their own aesthetic boundaries.

I rather like that now. One of the most tedious exhortations at art school in the 1980s was, ‘make it bigger…’ - as though the size of the artwork itself was some kind of route into significance…where, more often than not, it just led to portentousness.

However, the modest scale of the drawings in Small Records of Attention can look like a deliberate artistic decision — and eventually, perhaps, it became one. But its origins were considerably more prosaic. There simply wasn’t room for anything much bigger.

There was another discipline too. Nothing could remain ceremonially undisturbed awaiting tomorrow’s inspiration. During the colder months especially, the wheelhouse was also our dining room and television room. At the end of a drawing session, pencils, pens, paper, sharpeners, erasers and whatever else had accumulated around me had to disappear.

The studio had to become a home again.

Quite literally, I had to clear the table.

Perhaps that daily disappearance of the studio mattered. It prevented the business of making art from becoming too precious or too separate from everything else. Drawing took its place alongside navigation, cooking, walking the dogs, shopping, talking, repairing things and occasionally sitting down in front of the television. It was part of the ordinary texture of living aboard rather than an activity conducted somewhere specially designated as the artist’s studio.

And because Boschplaat moved, the studio moved with us.

But movement alone wasn’t enough. The boat provided the space in which I could work; our stoppages provided the time. Once the old DAF engine was silent and the ropes were secured, that small table in the wheelhouse could become a studio again. Between those two very practical conditions — a place to make something and sufficient time in which to notice something worth making — much of Small Records of Attention became possible.

There is a pleasing circularity to it. The boat carried us onwards, while repeatedly providing the circumstances in which I could stop. The studio itself was therefore caught between movement and stillness: travelling for kilometres along a waterway one day, then remaining in precisely the same place for several days afterwards while the world immediately beyond its windows slowly became familiar.

The waterways supplied a changing procession of possible subjects, but there was no obligation to turn any of them into pictures. We could moor, stay awhile, walk, look and move on. Occasionally something arrested that movement long enough for the sketchbook to appear.

Daubigny had Le Botin. Monet had his little bateau-atelier on the Seine.

I had a wheelhouse with a vintage DAF engine beneath the floor, a couple of dogs wandering around my feet, and the knowledge that whatever artistic breakthrough might presently be occurring, the table would still be needed for dinner and watching Pointless, Schiitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso, Ghosts, House of Games, Ludwig…

05/09/2026

Tree, Le Mas-d’Agenais, Canal de Garonne. 2016 — journal pencil drawing on A5 sketchbook.

I drew this tree on the bank of the Canal de Garonne at Le Mas-d’Agenais in 2016. I gave it the straightforward journal title—a tree identified by its place, as though that were sufficient explanation. But there was, maybe, something else going on…and I make no apology for delving into a bit of theory here:

The village holds an improbable treasure. Inside the Romanesque church of Saint-Vincent is Rembrandt’s Christ on the Cross, painted in 1631, when Rembrandt was twenty-five. The picture is small, approximately a metre high, and originally intended for private devotion. Christ’s pale and intensely vulnerable body emerges from an enveloping darkness. The painting was bought in 1804 by Xavier Duffour, a soldier originating from Le Mas-d’Agenais, and given to his native parish the following year. Its attribution remained uncertain until a restoration in 1959 revealed Rembrandt’s monogram and the date beneath the feet of Christ.

There is something appropriately improbable about encountering a Rembrandt in a modest village beside the canal. Yet perhaps no more improbable than many of the things encountered while travelling slowly through France: objects and histories concealed behind ordinary façades, waiting without apparent impatience for someone to stop and look and think.

I had seen the painting in reproduction, and looking at this drawing now, I wonder whether something of it remained with me in the context and framing of the church and the mini-drama of the journey. The pale trunk appears almost bodily against the heavily worked graphite. Its mass rises from the narrow strip of the canal, while the branches on the right extend into the darkness with a gesture that might suggest an arm—or the memory of one. The tree is illuminated and engulfed at the same time.

I make no grand claim for Rembrandt’s influence. If it is present, it is highly attenuated: a distant visual residue carried from the church to the canal bank without my consciously noticing. Yet the word attenuated may describe more than the modest degree of that influence. It may point towards the mechanism by which influence becomes possible.

Saussure places the linguistic sign between two amorphous masses: the indistinct field of thought and the equally indistinct field of sound. Neither arrives already divided into stable units. Their articulation produces those units through what he calls a “somewhat mysterious process” in which “thought-sound” develops divisions and language begins to take shape. Meaning does not simply descend into a waiting word, nor does a sound independently discover its corresponding idea. Each is articulated through the other.

Between the signifier and the signified, Saussure draws a line. Lacan later gives this line a more resistant character as the bar across which signification slides and struggles. It prevents meaning from passing transparently from one side to the other. A signifier does not deliver its signified intact; it enters into relations with other signifiers, acquiring and losing associations as it moves among them.

Derrida, in Of Grammatology, enters into Saussure’s “somewhat mysterious process” and finds that the distinction between signifier and signified cannot remain secure. The signified is never present in a pure state, awaiting its material expression. It is already marked by difference, already inhabited by traces of other signs, and therefore capable of becoming another signifier in turn. Meaning arises through this movement of difference and deferral—through différance—rather than arriving as the recovery of some intact original presence.

Something comparable may have happened between Rembrandt’s painting and my drawing of the tree.

There was no complete and securely constituted meaning—Christ on the Cross—stored in my memory and subsequently transferred to the tree. What remained after seeing the painting was already dispersed: a pale body emerging from darkness; an upright form under tension; a lateral extension; an atmosphere of isolation; perhaps the peculiar force with which Rembrandt allows light to disclose vulnerability. Detached from the painting’s title, location and iconography, these qualities persisted as traces. They became part of an indistinct visual and mnemonic field.

On the canal bank, that field encountered another: the material presence of the tree, the fall of light upon its trunk, the obscurity of the surrounding vegetation, the texture of the paper, the graphite in my hand, and the duration of my attention. The drawing emerged from the articulation of these fields. Its forms were produced through the pressure they exerted upon one another.

The Rembrandt did not supply a meaning which the tree then illustrated. It had already lost the integrity required for such a direct transmission. What crossed the bar was incomplete and displaced: an arrangement of light and darkness, a bodily tension, a disposition towards a particular form. The subject of the earlier painting had fallen away, while something of its structure remained active.

Attenuation, then, does not merely mean that an influence has weakened. It describes the loss through which an influence becomes capable of transformation. The source must surrender something of its identity—its name, its subject and its claim to wholeness—before it can become operative elsewhere. It survives as a trace which alters perception without announcing its origin. Influence may be an earlier image losing its identity sufficiently to become active in another.

The tree’s subsequent allegorical appearance belongs to this process. It is subsequent because I did not set out to draw a crucifixion, nor was I conscious of disguising one as a tree. The allegory becomes apparent afterwards, through the drawing and through my later reading of it. The pale trunk begins to appear bodily; the extending branch acquires the quality of a gesture; the surrounding graphite assumes the depth of an engulfing darkness. Each remains materially what it is, while entering a chain of signification that exceeds it.

The tree does not become a fixed symbol for the crucified Christ. Such an equation would close the movement down too quickly. Its allegorical force lies in the instability of the resemblance—in the oscillation between tree and body, branch and arm, illumination and suffering. The tree remains fully present as a tree, rooted on the bank of the Canal de Garonne, while also carrying a surplus that neither the tree nor the drawing can entirely account for.

My recognition of the possible Rembrandt connection becomes another stage in the process. It does not uncover a meaning that had been lying complete and concealed within the drawing since 2016. The act of recognition joins the chain and alters it. The drawing can now signify differently because it has been brought into relation with the painting once again. Allegory appears retrospectively, generated between the remembered picture, the drawn tree and the present act of looking.

The sequence might therefore be described as:

encounter — retention — attenuation — trace — articulation — allegorical appearance.

Even this orderly sequence risks making the process sound more obedient than it is. Traces do not wait patiently in memory to be summoned. They mingle with other images, sensations and experiences; they become inseparable from the hand’s accumulated habits and the eye’s learned preferences. By the time they reappear, their provenance may be recoverable only as conjecture.

The drawing records a tree before me on a particular day in 2016. It also records, without knowing that it does so, the instability of seeing: the way the visible world arrives already crossed by other images. Rembrandt’s small painting may have accompanied me from the church to the canal, divested of its name and subject, leaving only sufficient pressure to affect the graphite.

Across the bar, the influence could not pass intact. It arrived as difference, delay and trace. From that attenuated remainder, the tree learned—somewhat mysteriously—how to make its allegorical appearance.

27/08/2026

Untitled, 1976
Oil on board

For me, there is something wonderfully unsettled about this early painting: a house reconstructed by a mixture of dreaming and recollection rather than measured, ‘pure’ recollection.

Untitled was painted at home in Fleet, in 1976, during an early encounter with oils and many years before art school. Its source was a timber-framed family cottage in Isleham, Cambridgeshire that I had visited as a child. I could never summon the building as a complete place. What remained were architectural fragments: stairs, walls, roofs, passages and oddly emphatic details, separated from any reliable floor plan. Memory had kept the pieces and quietly disposed of the instructions for assembling them.

Two objects survived with particular clarity. There was an outside lavatory—a shed containing little more than a wooden board with a hole cut into it—and a small, ancient organ, whose pedals had to be pumped before it would produce a sound. Both required the body to operate the architecture: one through the blunt necessities of childhood, the other through mechanical breath, pressure and effort. Perhaps that is why they endured when so much else disappeared.

Isleham carries a further significance. It is as close as I have ever come to a paternal origin story. My father’s family came from the village and its surrounding countryside, an area shaped by farms and by the generations of people who worked upon them. Harveys remain plentiful there even now. The name occurs on houses, records and gravestones, suggesting a family presence dispersed across the landscape rather than contained within a single ancestral home.

The family genealogy reaches still further back, tracing the Harveys to the Hervés who came to England with William the Conqueror. It also claims a paternal connection to Hervey le Breton, the first Bishop of Ely. Whether encountered through documents, family account or the imaginative pressure exerted by a name, such ancestry arrives in fragments too: a Norman crossing, a bishop, a fenland village, a timber-framed cottage and a child trying to understand the shape of the place from inside it.

In the painting, the cottage has become an impossible structure of stairways, platforms, chimneys and partial rooms. The dark blue presses around it like night, while the white edges give each fragment the insistence of something momentarily recovered. Perspective shifts from one section to another; the eye climbs, turns and loses its bearings. The house behaves as remembered places often do in dreams: every part feels familiar, although the whole has never existed in quite this form.

Seen across fifty years, the painting appears to be searching for an origin while already acknowledging that origins cannot be viewed whole. They survive as names, structures, family stories and peculiar objects: a pedal organ waiting for breath, a hole cut into a board, a staircase leading towards a room that memory has removed.

Long before I had the language for any of this, the painting was assembling its own small archaeology of attention.

19/08/2026

Sometime in the early 2000s, on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Sally, I bought a small scale model of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. There were quite a few of them in the museum shop, displayed in stylishly designed boxes. I remember it simply as an amusing Duchampian trinket: part souvenir, part model, part art-historical joke. It wasn’t expensive. I liked it, bought it, took it home and, at some point, discarded the box.

In retrospect, throwing away the box may have been the first significant act in the story.

For the last ten years or so the little Bicycle Wheel has lived with us aboard Boschplaat, our vintage Dutch boat. This was perhaps not the ideal conservation environment. Boats move. They vibrate. Things get knocked. Damp and temperature fluctuate. Shelves are smaller than they ought to be and carry considerably more than they were designed for. Objects acquire histories simply by surviving.

And this one did acquire a history.

Gradually the spokes began separating from the wheel. I watched its geometry become increasingly precarious, but did nothing particularly useful about it. It was still recognisably Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, after all, and I rather liked having it around.

Then, the other day, the shelf on which it was stored collapsed.

The model fell to the floor.

Fatally damaged, one might say.

A few days later I began idly searching the internet for a replacement. I assumed there would be another one somewhere: perhaps another old museum-shop example for £50 or £100. Then came the moment of joy — I’d found one.

Followed very quickly by the discovery of the price.

$10,000.

What the f**k?

Further searches produced others. The prices varied, but they remained firmly and bewilderingly in the thousands.

It transpired that the amusing little Duchampian object I had bought for a modest sum all those years ago was not simply some generic museum-shop reproduction. It was an official reproduction, sanctioned by the Duchamp Estate. Over the intervening years these things had become collectible. The stylish cardboard packaging I had casually discarded had become part of its provenance. The untouched object had become scarce, desirable and valuable.

Meanwhile, I had done something increasingly inadvisable in the contemporary art market.

I had lived with mine.

I had handled it, moved it, displayed it and eventually taken it aboard an old Dutch boat and carried it around the inland waterways of France. It had accumulated dust, movement, vibration, accidents and time. Spokes detached. Its immaculate miniature geometry slowly failed. Finally gravity intervened.

Looking at these two photographs now — a kind of accidental before-and-after diptych — something else begins to happen.

The first shows the object behaving itself. Wheel, fork, stool: Duchamp’s wonderfully useless machine reproduced in miniature. And then there is its shadow, doubling the wheel on the ground.

In the second photograph the object has become dysfunctional. The spokes have collapsed towards the hub; others stick uselessly into space. The wheel remains circular but the machine beneath it seems to have imploded. Yet the shadow still insists upon the wheel. It seems almost to remember the geometry the object itself has lost.

And I find myself rather liking it.

Because somewhere during this slow deterioration my copy seems to have stopped merely reproducing Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and started behaving like a Duchamp.

There is an additional joke here that I suspect Duchamp himself might have enjoyed.

The history of Bicycle Wheel is already a history of originals, replicas, authorised replicas and reconstructions. The 1913 object itself was lost. Duchamp made another. Further versions followed. As with so much of his work, the apparently straightforward question — where is the original? — rapidly becomes considerably less straightforward.

And now my ridiculous little museum-shop version has acquired its own minor variation on the problem.

What, exactly, has been damaged?

Financially, the answer is fairly obvious. Had I kept it untouched in its handsome box for twenty-odd years, I might now possess a surprisingly valuable collectible. Instead I have a bicycle wheel on a stool with most of its spokes hanging forlornly around its hub and several detached bits awaiting whatever fate I decide for them.

But the thing I actually bought in Philadelphia — the joke, the absurdity, the pleasure of possessing a tiny Bicycle Wheel — seems somehow still present.

Perhaps more present.

The pristine examples now selling for thousands have undergone an extraordinary transformation of their own. Objects originally sold as accessible museum-shop multiples have become sufficiently valuable that their owners must protect them from the very thing mine has been subjected to:

Life.

The box must remain. The object must remain pristine. Nothing must bend, detach, fade or acquire the smallest evidence of having existed anywhere other than within the conditions necessary to preserve its exchange value.

Mine has spectacularly failed that test.

And so I have decided not to restore it.

The temptation, initially, was to find someone capable of carefully replacing the spokes and returning everything to approximately its original condition. I now think that would erase precisely what has become interesting about it. I’ll keep the loose spokes, tiny nuts and fragments. If anything else falls off, that too can be retained. But no heroic reconstruction.

It can remain as it is: an authorised reproduction of a reconstruction of a lost readymade, bought as a museum-shop souvenir, removed from its packaging, lived with for more than twenty years, transported aboard a Dutch boat through France, progressively dismantled by time and finally subjected to the decisive intervention of a collapsing shelf.

A stoppage, perhaps.

Or simply another small record of attention.

Somewhere, meanwhile, somebody owns a perfect example in its original box, currently advertised at $10,000.

I hope they enjoy it.

But they probably shouldn’t take it out.

12/08/2026

Journal pencil drawing on sketchbook paper - (Châtel-sur-Moselle ramparts) - Saturday 07/08/21.

The fortress here refuses to appear all at once.

A wall, then vegetation. A drop in the ground. A dry moat. Masonry disappearing beneath roots and undergrowth. Another wall where one had not quite expected it. At Châtel-sur-Moselle the remains of the old fortress are extensive enough for any sense of the whole to keep slipping away. Centuries of building, alteration, damage and abandonment have left something that belongs as much to the contours of the ground as to architecture.

The dogs had no difficulty with any of this. History was beside the point. There were tracks to follow, smells caught along the edges of walls, changes of direction, interesting patches of earth and vegetation. Walking with them through the fortifications produced two overlapping versions of the same place: one preoccupied with masonry, scale and the accumulated evidence of time; the other immediate, olfactory and close to the ground.

Then, somewhere along the ramparts, this view.

The wall cuts almost brutally across the drawing, a dense horizontal accumulation of graphite. It is difficult to tell where masonry ends and earth or vegetation begins. Beyond it, the town seems surprisingly slight. The slender spire of the Église Saint-Laurent rises above the roofs, almost too delicate for the weight of everything around it.

The pencil became less obedient elsewhere. Marks scratch through the foreground and vegetation and escape into the sky. Some describe; others seem simply to register the physical agitation of being there. Large areas of paper are left almost untouched while the rampart itself has been worked towards blackness. There was little inclination to enumerate stones or make an archaeological account of the place. Its weight was enough.

Only incidentally was this a maritime journey.

Boschplaat was moored somewhere below. Châtel-sur-Moselle was one of the stoppages during our circuit through the Vosges, eventually taking us out onto the Rhine at Strasbourg. Looking across the journeys recorded in these sketchbooks, it is curious how many such stoppages were marked by fortifications: forts, castles, châteaux, ramparts, fortified towns. The waterways themselves seem almost to have arranged the encounters. Hardly surprising, perhaps. Rivers and canals have always carried commerce, armies and territorial ambition, and the places controlling them accumulated walls.

There is no need to make too much of the recurrence. But it persists. A journey characterised by movement repeatedly brought us alongside structures whose purpose had been to impede it; travelling through open country by water, we kept stopping beneath walls designed to enclose, overlook or defend. The contradiction remained largely unnoticed at the time. They were simply there — another château above a river, another rampart beside a canal, another fort encountered while walking the dogs.

For a while at Châtel the water disappeared altogether. The journey became terrestrial: dogs, paths, steep ground, a dry moat, old walls, a sketchbook and pencil.

Perhaps this is one reason the drawing resists becoming a picturesque record of a medieval fortress. There is no commanding prospect and no attempt to restore what is missing. The ruins remain incomplete, encumbered by the present, absorbed into vegetation and town. Saint-Laurent still punctures the skyline; houses occupy their places beyond the walls; paths continue through what was once organised for defence.

History here is difficult to separate from solidity and texture.

Eventually the ramparts gave way again to streets, the walk folded back towards the mooring, and the larger waterborne journey resumed. But the drawing had already detached itself from that itinerary. It records no arrival and proposes no destination.

Just a place where a walk stopped.

Glenn Harvey Art

07/09/2026

06/09/2026

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