About Rob Harris

Rob Harris is an Australian contemporary artist working exclusively in charcoal.

His practice explores connection, protection and belonging through the relationship between living forms.

Working primarily at large scale, Rob creates highly detailed charcoal works in which animals are stripped of their natural environment and reimagined through form, proximity and negative space.

Rather than simply depicting the animal, the work uses it as a vehicle for exploring something more universal. The relationships, instincts and tensions that connect us.

His compositions are deliberately restrained. White space becomes part of the work. Individual bodies become structure. Relationships become form.

Working exclusively in charcoal on museum-grade French cotton paper, Rob builds each work through thousands of individual marks, creating a tension between the precision of hyperrealism and the conceptual simplicity of the finished composition.

Wild Hearts

Wild Hearts represents the evolution of this practice into a series of museum-scale works exploring family, protection and belonging through the natural world.

Each composition brings animals together in moments of proximity, creating forms that suggest the heart without ever drawing one.

Studio practice

Rob’s daughter, Georgia Harris, has been part of his artistic practice since she was eleven.

Over that time, she has contributed directly to more than 20 large-scale works across his series. Their shared studio practice has evolved over the years and continues within Wild Hearts, with Georgia contributing directly to each original. This is an important part of the history of the practice.

Rob and Georgia Harris were recently featured in My Modern Met and International Artist magazine.