Layan Harman

Layan Harman (b. 1997) grew up in rural Devon, South-West England, and is currently based in London.

He completed a Ba in Fine Art at London Metropolitan University with first class honours in 2020.

His recent residencies include a collaborative residency alongside Skye Turner at the Center for Recent Drawing, Islington, in February 2023, and a residency at Mawffa Mawddach, Wales, in December 2022. He was a member of the 2021-22 cohort of the Into the Wild artist's development programme. He runs Fleshy Wisdoms, a performance night at the Steamship Project Space in East London.

Layan works between London and Devon. His practice spans across sculpture, installation, costume, performance, film, and sound. He uses traditional techniques like forging, carving, weaving, and sewing to explore ecology as interlinked with human activity and culture. Using these materials and techniques, he creates objects, costumes, sculptures, or environments that evoke an ancient, ambiguously ritualistic character.

I feel that massive issues like climate breakdown or the brutality of capitalist exploitation are best addressed by art on local, specific terms. I therefore look for specific points of difficulty or negotiation between human and more-than-human worlds, such as fragments of ancient woodland, beekeeping practices, or a space telescope, from which to tease out these much wider, underlying concerns. I conduct my research in close listening with my environment, often responding to the place I make work in, traces of the past extant in the landscape, or my own cultural heritage and context, always looking to be rooted, emplaced.

I create ritual equipment, sites of transformation, or remnants of speculative cultural practices that flow from these negotiations. I aim to speak from a place of timelessness, creating work that could be ancient yet points towards a transformed future. I always leave room for the mystery- that which is fragmented, hidden, or unknowable. Much of my work stems from recognising and valuing the ungraspable nature of the earth’s ecological systems, the distant past, or the cosmos, as a counterpoint to Western culture’s implicit belief that something must be understood in order to have worth.

The act of working with materials, learning and developing manual skills, conversing and problem solving alongside physical matter, is very important to me. It is a point of interface between “internal” and “external” worlds- the reciprocal transformation that occurs during the making process between body, material, and environment demonstrates the permeability of these perceived divides. In using evocative materials such as honeycomb, amber, or gathered clay I suggest an archaeological reading of my work- it is “material culture”, residual remains of beliefs, mythologies, or traditions, existing as matter.

Mythmaking is a central part of my work, as a timeless method by which we as humans collectively build the world we exist in. Rather than seeing this as Cartesian mind/matter divide, I take the view that our mythical world-making is therefore part our environment, of ecology, passing beyond the human. As Western culture becomes increasingly withdrawn from its environment due to the advances of capitalist exploitation, I believe there is an important role for art to play in inoculating our cultural landscape with the possibility for revering and respecting that which is beyond our human knowing.